1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. II 

H 



3To. .Cfr 1 



PROTESTANTISM IN PARIS: 



A SERIES OF 



DISCOURSES, 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH 



A. COQUEEEL. 



LONDON: 
EDWARD T. WHITFIELD, 
178 Steand. 
1854. 



1 THE LIBRA AT | v J fa 

of conoeem! ^7 , 

WASHI NOTOM I > O 



PREFACE. 



Athanase Coquerel, the author of the 
following discourses, may well be selected 
as the exponent of Protestantism in Paris, 
occupying as he does so prominent a posi- 
tion in the Reformed Church of France. 

M. Coquerel is a preacher, whose great 
eloquence has earned for him, in the course 
of his more than thirty years' ministry, a 
corresponding reputation and influence : as 
a writer, he is perhaps still more widely 
known, being the author of a book called 
Experimental Christianity, a discussion of 
the fundamental doctrines of our religion, 
based upon a critical examination of the 



iv 



PREFACE. 



original texts ; of A Reply to " The Life 
of Jesus " by Strauss ; of two letters on 
the Hieroglyphic System of Champollion, 
considered in its relation to the Sacred 
Writings ; and of a variety of other works : 
finally, he has been before the public, as a 
member of the last Assembly of France, 
previous to the coup d'etat of December 2d. 

He is, therefore, a man whose opinions, 
both for themselves and for the extent of 
their influence over the minds of others, 
are entitled to consideration ; and it is in 
this view that the translator, adhering as 
closely as possible to the style and lan- 
guage of the author, has desired to present 
some of his ideas to those who may not 
have access to them in the original. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

THE SECOND DEATH 1 

ETERNAL PUNISHMENT ...... 41 

THE FAITH OF THOMAS. — AN EASTER SERMON . 82 
CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. — A CHRISTMAS SER- 
MON .110 

ST. PAUL, THE THIRTEENTH APOSTLE . . . 140 
THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY . . . .172 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



"Let him that hath ears hearken to what the Spirit saith to the 
churches : He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second 
death . " — Ap o c alyp se ii . 11 . 

My Brethren, — 

Men have asked themselves, in the vague 
studies in which Mysticism delights, and 
in the cold discussions of Rationalism, 
which is no better, and throws piety into 
an extreme equally false ; men have asked 
themselves if the intention of Creation, if 
the object of Life was goodness or happi- 
ness, virtue or enjoyment, good living or 
well-being, the true good, to practise or to 
enjoy. The question interests Christianity 
so nearly, that one may easily put it in 
Christian terms, and bring it into the do- 
1 



2 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



main of faith, in seeking if the result of 
the Redemption, that Jesus Christ had 
above all in view, is the progress, the moral 
perfection, the immortal sanctification of 
his disciples ; or the pardon, the salvation, 
peace of soul in this world, and a celestial 
felicity in the other. 

The partisans of the two systems have 
lost their cause by exaggeration. You 
would, say they on one side, be virtuous 
only from interest, sell to God your obedi- 
ence, make of faith a bargain and a calcu- 
lation of integrity, and, so to say, discount 
your virtues one by one with your Creator ! 
You would serve him under condition, and 
know beforehand what your service will 
bring you ! Instead of practising good for 
the love of good, of professing the truth 
from an admiration for it, and of loving 
God because he is supremely lovable, you 
dare to raise for a moment the eternal bal- 
ances, in order to assure yourself that the 
future recompense will equal your merit, 
and speculate thus for eternity on your 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



3 



works of a day. If it is forbidden to be 
interested for the world, has one the right 
to be for heaven ? This cupidity of remu- 
neration prepares the misreckonings which 
attend it, in taking from faithfulness its 
value ; you are not a worshipper, but a 
merchant in the Temple ; the incense thus 
put up for sale does not mount toward 
God ; you believe yourself a saint, you are 
an egotist. 

It is replied : You would then be virtu- 
ous in averting your regards from the just 
consequences of virtue ; you would take 
away from piety its sweetness and its 
charms, and from the midst of the things 
of this world, you would elevate it into a 
sanctuary so inclosed, that no emotion of 
joy, no splendor of hope could penetrate 
there ; you would have faithfulness promote 
in no way happiness or peace, and that 
it should teach impossibility, not content. 
This absolute disinterestedness has nothing 
human ; one cannot place and hold himself 
thus aside from sentiments which arise of 



4 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



themselves, disenchant his future, fight in 
forgetting that victory crowns, sow in for- 
getting that the harvest enriches ; this is to 
aspire to a factitious sanctity which takes 
temerity for progress, and which forgets in 
its transports that it is still attached to 
earth ; man seeks in vain to dissuade him- 
self from goodness ; you believe yourself a 
saint, you are arrogant. 

At an equal distance from these two ex- 
tremes, the truth holds itself firm. He 
who in the task of his life dreams only of 
merit or happiness, forgets one half of his 
heart, and then human nature revenges it- 
self, by making him miss his end. Man is 
not alone a moral, perfectible, religious 
being, nor only a sensible being, with the 
right of interesting himself in himself, and 
of shaping for himself a lot, of satisfaction 
and joy ; he is both, so that it is as natural 
and as legitimate to seek contentment as 
progress ; " No one" say^ St. Paul, " has 
ever hated himself" ; we must be good, it 
is a duty, we must be happy, it is a right, — 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



5 



duty and right which go together ; for God, 
free (let us never forget it) to create us or 
not, has not drawn us from naught in order 
to see us suffer. To isolate virtue from fe- 
licity, to disjoin sanctification and peace, — 
what is it then, if not to separate the effect 
from the cause, the stream from the foun- 
tain-head, the ray from the star which sends 
it, and which ought necessarily to send it ? 
Again, my brethren, Revelation, far from 
encouraging us presumptuously to break 
the divine bond which God himself has 
formed between duty and happiness, never 
throws into forgetfulness either the con- 
science or human sensibility ; who better 
than Jesus could comprehend that, in labor- 
ing to render us better, he labored to make 
us happier, and revelation, in accord with 
our nature, does not permit the separation 
of virtue and its fruits. Let us not be more 
disinterested than the Gospel, and let us 
believe in these divine declarations scattered 
in profusion throughout the Sacred Writ- 
ings, the blessings, the pardons, the recom- 



6 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



penses, peace in this world and bliss in the 
other, admirable promises, of which faith 
makes for itself a treasure ; let us believe 
in the menaces, the condemnations, and 
anguish, — inevitable judgments of God pro- 
nounced beforehand against the wicked. 

Of all the figures that the Gospel 

employs to depict their fate, I know not if 
there can be found one more striking than 
the expression of my text: " He that oven^ 
cometh shall not be hurt of the second 
death " / 

The second death ! How striking 

and poetical is this strange expression ! one 
feels in it a touch of genius, even before 
seeing there a line of truth. What ideas 
concealed in this connection ; what remem- 
brances for us who know death through 
affliction ; what forebodings for us who 
have it in perspective ! Evidently this 
word is an image ; let us endeavor to ren- 
der to ourselves an account of the thoughts 
that it represents, and in order to succeed, 
let us compare attentively the death with 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



7 



which we are acquainted by experience — 
death terrestrial, physical, temporal — with 
this other death, that no eye has seen, of 
which no eaT has heard the groans, which 
is not of the earth, and which has no tomb, 
— with the second death. 

I. The expression of the text has perhaps 
caused you sufficient surprise, to make it 
proper to describe the setting in which the 
sacred poet has placed it, and to admire the 
art with which he brings it out ; it is found 
only in the Apocalypse, it appears there 
three times ; it is in harmony with this 
style so full of imagery, the obscurities of 
which have so much exercised the inven- 
tive spirit of commentators. This book, 
my brethren, where has been obstinately 
sought the delineation of the future, instead 
of seeing in it simply the emblems of the 
past; and imaginary Jerusalems, Babylons, 
and Romes, instead of finding there again 
those of antiquity ; this book opens with 
seven epistles, addressed to the seven prin- 



8 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



cipal churches of Asia Minor. The text 
terminates the epistle to the church of 
Smyrna. This famous city, situated at the 
head of the Mediterranean Sea, received, 
so to say, all its waves, its merchandise, 
riches, errors, and vices ; it was one of those 
immense marts where Europe and Africa, 
the whole Roman Empire, came to pour 
out their treasures in exchange for the thou- 
sand products, always so much desired, of 
the climates and industry of the East ; 
thus Smyrna, raising itself always from its 
disasters, was still, in the early ages of the 
Church, filled with riches and philosophy, 
with pleasure and corruption. The Chris- 
tian Church flourished there, but small in 
numbers, and recruited as yet only among 
the poor and humble ; the Synagogue, on 
the contrary, counted many rich and emi- 
nent families, who gave — as everywhere 
else — the signal for persecution against 
the Christians. In order to judge of the 
ardor and power of this hate, it suffices to 
recall (whatever uncertainty may be thrown 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



9 



over these comparisons, by our ignorance 
of the epoch when the Apocalypse was 
composed) that the Synagogue had suffi- 
cient influence to have condemned to the 
stake a disciple of St. John, Polycarpus, 
who is believed to have been the first pas- 
tor of Smyrna, the author of a remarkable 
letter addressed to the believers of Philippi, 
and such was the rage of the executioners 
of the martyr, that they did not permit his 
disciples to save his body from the flames, 
into which they threw it again with their 
hands. The letter that the author of the 
Apocalypse writes to the Smyrniotes has 
for object to sustain their courage and their 
faith against the persecutions, of which he 
predicts to them the short duration, and he 
terminates it by this solemn declaration : 
" Let him that hath ears hearken to what the 
Spirit saith to the churches : He that over- 
cometh" he who shall not fly nor succumb 
in the struggle with the enemies of the 
faith, "shall not" whatever may happen, 
" suffer from the second death" 



10 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



II. Represent to yourselves the profound 
impression that these exhortations must 
have produced, terminated by this unforeseen 
and terrible sentence, which falls like a di- 
vine menace in the midst of the effeminate 
delights of a city of Ionia, and which made 

so striking a contrast to them Here 

I might pause to ask you if there would be 
any injustice, in finding some resemblance 
between the ancient Ionian city, so proud 
of its commerce, of its opulence, its civili- 
zation, and the city in whose midst rises 
this pulpit from whence I have just re- 
echoed, after so many centuries, the words 
of St. John, to raise before your eyes the 
solemn image of the second death, and 
say again to you, to you who have also a 
struggle to maintain, that you can obtain 
the same victory. Everything which makes 
the grandeur, the wealth, the confidence of 
the world, is possessed by our city, even to 
the hundred-fold of ancient Smyrna ; and 
as for purity of manners, holiness of faith, 
assiduity of worship .... But this would 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



11 



be to accumulate comparisons too much ; I 
promised you one between the two deaths ; 
for the parallel between the two cities I re- 
sign you to your consciences, and leave to 
you the care of making it. 

III. The course that I proposed to you 
to follow in order to arrive at a knowledge 
of the second death, by judging of it from 
the first, would perhaps be sterile, did we 
not commence by establishing, with a rig- 
orous exactitude, the consequences which 
naturally spring from the image in the text, 
and which it will be necessary to urge. 

First of all, a second death supposes a 
second life, and though you should accuse 
me of giving you in proof an argument 
almost puerile, worthy of drawing in reply 
a smile to your lips ; my brethren, to die it 
is necessary to live ; to enter a sepulchre, 
it is requisite to go out of a world ; a de- 
cease is impossible, without a previous ex- 
istence, and two deaths indicate two exist- 
ences. We find ourselves then, from the 
commencement of the subject, in presence 



12 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



of this truth without which there is no 
Christianity, nor morality except a morality 
without security, nor justice except a justice 
without sanction ; neither happiness, but a 
happiness without hope ; nor love, unless it 
be a cold and sad display of tenderness 
without a morrow ; in presence of immor- 
tality. It cannot be too often repeated : 
the Gospel is effaced to the last line, when 
the certainty of an immortal destiny is 
taken away from it ; Jesus has not saved 
us from anything ; his manger and his tomb 
become ordinary again ; his cross is only a 
useless piece of wood that the worms and 
decay reclaim ; what he has commanded 
is of no more importance than what he 
has promised, and if he abused you in his 
promises, he deceives you and tyrannizes 
over you in his commands. Everything 
changes, and the Gospel becomes again the 
Gospel, Christianity is truly a reconciliation 
of God and man, Revelation is the book of 
truth, Christian morality is divine, and love 
has a future for itself ; if the graves dug by 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



13 



our hands offer only a passage, the entrance 
into another career, the threshold of another 
mansion, the porch of another temple, the 
first step of another ascent toward God. 
Admirable chain of Christian revelations ! 
In order that the word redemption should 
have a meaning, the word immortality must 
have one ; it is necessary to believe in one's 
soul in order to believe in Jesus ; one must 
know himself immortal to be a Christian. 
..... A second death is possible only under 
condition of a second existence. 

IV. Thenceforward, one step more is easy 
toward the understanding of the text. Our 
first existence, our life of the world and of 
time, may receive two directions ; it may 
fill itself with good or evil ; give itself up 
to the love of truth or to the culture of 
error ; animate itself with the ardor of zeal, 
and glow with the flame of charity, or go 
to sleep by degrees in indifference and ice 
itself helplessly in the coldness of egotism. 
These alternatives are always possible, and 
they always retain their distinction, their 



14 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



dissimilarity, their separation. Ah ! no 
doubt, sin has two very different faces ; it is 
attractive, splendid, delicious, it shines with 
the brilliancy of false honor, it seduces with 
the soft language of false wisdom ; it has 
joys for each passing day, and promises for 
each morrow, when one sees it and listens 
to it at a distance, before following and be- 
lieving it, before delivering up one's soul to 
it ; the effervescence of the passions creates 
for us a mirage of sins where everything is 
reversed ; these deceptions of our evil ten- 
dencies are of all ages and all religions; 
Isaiah thunders against those " who call 
evil good, and good evil, who change dark- 
ness into light, and light into darkness, make 
bitter sweet, and sweet bitterP But the ex- 
perience of evil is always a delusion ; the 
charms of sin are dissipated with the sin ; 
it resumes sooner or later, and often with- 
out a long delay, its natural air ; and no 
one succeeds always in confounding in his 
conscience, and in the estimation that he 
makes of himself, duty and vice, godliness 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



15 



and lukewarmness, the service of God and 
forgetfulness of Him, charity and egotism ; 
no one can always deny to himself the 
difference between what God wishes and 
what He does not wish, between what at- 
tracts or repels from sovereign goodness ; 
the trees resemble one another in the fields 
of the world ; the forbidden fruit resembles 
no other, and one does not extirpate his 
conscience from his breast ; the task of life 
cannot be annulled ; one never entirely gets 
rid of all power of being good, nor all pro- 
pitious occasions; in the existence of pro- 
bation that we lead on this side of the 
natural tomb, two directions are always 
open before us, that of good or that of evil. 

V. The inevitable consequence presents 
itself and imposes itself as a necessity ; 
the two directions must lead to two desti- 
nies ; where everything is different, the re- 
sult differs in its turn ; employ here the im- 
age, the expression, the argument, that you 
may find the most conclusive or the clear- 
est ; talk morality, justice, or logic ; make 



16 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



of good and evil, causes, and point out the 
effects ; premises, and deduce the conse- 
quences ; conditions, and indicate the guar- 
anties ; laws, and proclaim their sanctions ; 
the terms matter little, this truth is of all 
religions and all immortalities, because it is 
a truth of all consciences : good can lead 
only to felicity, and evil only to trouble. In 
vain, in a moment of surprise, you will say 
to yourselves that the reverse is produced 
everywhere before your eyes, that the just 
suffer, that the wicked triumph, that the 
ashes amidst which Job laments his troubles 
accumulate everywhere near the bed where 
Dives reposes : that the crown of thorns 
never blunts all its points It is pre- 
cisely because justice is not of this world, 
that we require new heavens and a new earth 
where it shall reign. One world for trials, 
one for requital, it is the just division, it is 
enough and nothing more ; for it is place 
and time for everything. And to deny that 
good gives birth to happiness, and evil to 
anguish, to deny this order to which the 



THE SECOND DEATH. 17 

present life itself is often a witness, to deny- 
that this division will complete itself in a 
sphere of existence nearer to God, and pre- 
pared express, is to abolish at one blow 
morality and religion, to cut off the Cross 
of Christ at the foot and throw it to the 
devils ; it is to deny Man, who becomes an 
inexplicable being capable only of pleasure, 
and not of happiness; it is to deny God, 
the eternal legislator of free and religious 
beings, and as such the avenger of evil and 
the rewarder of good. Thus, my brethren, 
there is no doctrine that the Gospel ex- 
presses with a more simple and sublime 
clearness ; the words so touching, Come 
unto me ye, the blessed of my Father, and 
these so terrible, Withdraw from me, work- 
ers of iniquity, the Gospel shows to us as 
necessary in the mouth of the Sovereign 
Judge ; we must all appear, it is said, before 
the tribunal of Christ, in order that each may 
receive according to the good or the evil that 

he shall have done False lights of the 

wisdom of the wicked, which dazzle too 
2 



18 THE SECOND DEATH. 

i 

often their feeble eyes, how vacillating and 
pale ye become by the side of this mag- 
nificent light ! 

VI. Two existences to traverse, one be- 
fore, the other after the grave ; two direc- 
tions to follow, the good and the evil ; two 
destinies to undergo in consequence, happi- 
ness or misery ; such are, my brethren, the 
points that we have just touched upon, and 
this misery reserved for the wicked the text 
depicts in a single phrase : it is the second 
death. 

Everywhere in the, Sacred Writings, in 
the morality and poetry of the books of the 
old dispensation, and still more, if possible, 
in the Gospel, life is the image of salva- 
tion and recompense, death, that of judg- 
ment and punishment. Moses has spoken 
this language, I have placed before thee, 
said he to Israel, life and death, benediction 
and malediction ; choose now life : the 
prophets who succeed him, I take no 
pleasure in the death of him who dies, says 
the Eternal; convert yourselves, then, and 



THE SECOND DEATH. 19 



live ; and our Divine Master has said, All 
shall rise from the tomb, those who have well 
done to the resurrection of life, those who 
shall have done ill to the resurrection of con- 
demnation. This last contrast alone would 
have sufficed to inspire the genius of the 
author of the Apocalypse, to designate the 
state of the wicked as a second death. But 
why so many allegories, you will say, why 
this emblematical style ? would it not have 
been preferable to paint the sufferings of 
the rebuked in a more natural manner, and 
to dispense the faith from the efforts ne- 
cessary to separate the idea and the image ? 
No, brethren. In order to render to one's 
self an exact account of the manner in 
which a sensible being enjoys or suffers, it 
is necessary to be fully acquainted with his 
mode of existence ; the elements, the con- 
ditions of the future existence are concealed 
from us ; and the little that we know of it 
does not suffice to give us a complete knowl- 
edge of the sufferings of the wicked. The 
whole is, then, an image, both for the joys 



20 THE SECOND DEATH. 



of heaven, and the pains of hell ; but 
these figures have nothing deceitful, and 
before an enlightened faith, which holds 
itself at a distance from the superstitions 
of the Middle Ages, and has accustomed 
itself to the language of the Sacred Books, 
the image remains as poetry; the idea ap- 
pears as a teaching ; the flames extinguish 
themselves ; the smoke of the torments no 
longer rises; the lake of sulphur and fire 
disappears ; the worm of remorse ceases to 
gnaw, and it becomes evident that there are 
no more flames in hell, than festivals, 
feasts, and hymns in heaven. The punish- 
ments of immortality are moral, spiritual, 
religious, so to speak ; it is the soul which 
suffers ; in other terms, as heaven is in the 
heart of the righteous, so hell is in the heart 
of the wicked ; and this thought conducts 
in the exploration of the mortality of the 
soul to a last discovery, which I shall ren- 
der, I hope, before the end of this discourse, 
fruitful for your faith. Nothing is more 
false than to represent to one's self heaven 



THE SECOND DEATH. 21 



as one abode, one world, a palace of de- 
lights ; hell, as another abode, another 
world, an abyss of torments ; the one and 
the other placed at a distance, with I know 
not what barrier or what gulf between the 
two ; this is to degrade immortality, to be- 
little the universe, thus to divide it ; it is 
transporting into the celestial regions our 
little measures of distance. No, the spirit 
of a Christian submissive to the warning 
of Jesus, that the letter kills, and that the 
spirit vivifies, disengages itself from these 
forms and emblems, and succeeds in com- 
prehending that heaven and hell are not 
places, separated and distinct ; but different 
conditions, manners of being, manners of 
feeling, of understanding, of believing, and, 
in consequence, of enjoying and suffering. 
Here, brethren, is the truth of the facts, the 
reality of things ; here is the only heaven 
and the only hell which accord with the 
nature of our spiritual souls, and heavens 
and hells compatible with men are truly 
necessary, since it is for men that they are 
destined. 



22 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



VII. After all these developments, I re- 
call you by a single question to my text : 
Do you know in the actual world anything 
more cruel and more afflicting than death ? 
No, undoubtedly, and in order to give us 
some idea, some measure of the anguish, 
that the wicked experience in the world of 
justice, the sacred author calls their state 
the second death. Now, then, let us bring 
up the death which is so well known to us, 
the death which reigns and strikes in this 
world, and let us interrogate it; let us en- 
deavor to illumine for a moment its gloom, 
and to sound its mysteries of grief ; let us 
try to seize the most private sorrows to 
which it gives rise ; let us see how it afflicts, 
and know thus, as well as is possible, how 
the wicked are afflicted in the other life. 

And, in the first place, death undeceives. 
Many illusions seduce us in the life that we 
lead here below ; the list of them would be 
long and difficult to render complete, illu- 
sions of vanity, illusions of pleasure, illu- 
sions of hope and happiness, illusions even 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



23 



of labor and activity, leading us to under- 
take more than we can finish. Who does 
not suffer himself to be led astray by one 
of these deceitful allurements invented at 
leisure ; who has not his favorite chimera, 
and does not pursue some end which es- 
capes him ; who projects nothing, and never 
anticipates on the present ; in a word, who 
confines himself strictly to reality, gives no 
hold for the imagination, and regards not a 
luminous point at the horizon of his life, 
whose splendor he revives at moments ? 

Death comes How it dissipates the 

chimeras of life ; how the breath from the 
tomb sweeps them before it, extinguishing 
one by one those charming lights, which 
seemed from far to smile upon us, to attract 
us, and to throw out brilliancy only for us ! 
Brethren, neither wisdom nor age, neither 
experience nor even calumny and ingrati- 
tude, not all the sad failures of our best in- 
tentions, not the vexation of not being com- 
prehended, nor the discouragement of ge- 
nius, in a struggle against littleness and 



24 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



mediocrity of spirit, nothing disenchants 
like death ; it leaves us no means of de- 
ceiving ourselves. 

It has the power of impoverishing us, 
Equally with that of undeceiving us ; for it 
reduces our fortunes to something less than 
common dust. I speak here before the rich 
and happy of the world, accustomed to see 
themselves surrounded by the elegances and 
conveniences of wealth ; before the princes 
of the age, whose hereditary happiness glit- 
ters with the legitimate luxury accumulated 
by their families ; before the friends and 
protectors of the arts and sciences, whose 
taste or knowledge is admired with reason 
in the collections which they have made. 

Let them bring me the lists of all 

their treasures, treasures of wealth or treas- 
ures of masterpieces, and I defy them to 
show me a single one which does not lose 
all its value at the supreme moment when 
it shall be said to them, Dispose of thy 
house, for thou art about to die. The pov- 
erty of life is not comparable to that which 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



25 



death brings ; alone, it despoils of every- 
thing. The most profound destitution is 
that of which St. Paul speaks, when he 
says, We brought nothing into the ivorld, 
and it is evident that we shall carry nothing 
out of it. Dispose of thy house, is the last 
word of the history of all our terrestrial 
houses. 

Powerful to undeceive, powerful to im- 
poverish, death, which disabuses and de- 
prives of all things, does not deprive us of 
our regret and remorse ; on the contrary, it 
excites them, it renders them more poignant 
in the midst of the debility that it brings, 
more active amidst the idleness of the last 
days. "Who dies without regret for the 
manner in which he has lived; who dies 
without desiring to have again, and to re- 
act some of his days, or to efface them from 
his life ; who dies without occupying some 
of his last thoughts in saying and reiterating 
to himself during the sleeplessness of the 
last watches ; if I should recommence such 
or such a period of my mortal career, I 



26 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



would alter the course of it ; I would do 
those things which I have not done, and I 
would not do those which I have done ; I 
would live, I would work, I would love dif- 
ferently O sad vision of the past 

evoked by death, filling the little which re- 
mains to us of the present ; dark Shade of 
sins and egotism of former * times, who 
comest to add thy gloom to that of death, 
in vain one drives thee away, thou return- 
est in spite of us, and to fly from thee then 
is impossible, for death is the only asylum, 
and far from protecting against thee, it 
seconds all thy terrors ! 

Finally, brethren, death separates ; no 
love that it does not menace, no bond that 
it does not break, no gratitude that it does 
not reduce to impotency ; the distance that 
it places between friends, between the dear- 
est relations, is the most incommensurable 
of all, and its separations are the only com- 
plete ones that we know. ..... We love 

and aid one another, we have gently accus- 
tomed ourselves to the life in common, and 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



27 



to all in common with it; each day draws 
the union still closer ; it is intimate to the 
degree that one can scarcely perceive the 
intimacy augment ; the sanctuary of the 
family has become a true temple of peace ; 
it has its faithful rendezvous where one 
finds himself always with a new delight, 
after having turned some winding in the 
road ; it is a cradle where we have watched, 
prayed, loved together ; it is a circle of 
cherished children which forms itself again 
at times in its completeness, in order that 
the gratitude to God may be unanimous in 
its expression ; it is a happiness to be used, 
a success to exchange, something good to 
render better in partaking it with others, 
and suddenly behold Death ; he approaches, 
he enters ; he must be received ; he chooses, 
and in place of two hearts which beat so 
well in unison, there remains, here, a heart 
filled to overflowing with supreme anguish ; 
there, only a regard without response, hands 
without force, lips without voice ; dust is 
rendered to dust ; one returns to the roof 



28 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



that he is astonished to find deserted, and 
he perceives with a vague fear that he has 
yet to learn a lesson which he had thought 
to know, and that he knew not well, — a les- 
son of experience, the lesson of solitude 
which death gives. 

VIII. Yes, the actual and terrestrial 
death undeceives us and despoils us of 
everything; it revives our remorse ; it sun- 
ders all bonds ; such are the certain effects 
of its power, the ordinary acts of its sover- 
eignty. Transport these ideas beyond the 
tomb, beyond this life into that which fol- 
lows ; and in order that the sacred author 
should be right, that the expression he has 
originated may retain its prestige and its 
force, in order that the parallel may be just, 
all this must be found in the second death ; 
the second death must have at least the 
same power as the first ; the one must 
afflict the immortals, as the other mortals 
here below. Transport, I repeat it, into the 
future, these terrors, impoverishment, re- 
morse, these separations that our decease 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



29 



of a moment makes us undergo, and reflect 
that this anguish will be felt, not with our 
present force of perception, but with the 
faculties, the powers, the passions, of the 
soul endued with its immortal life, and ren- 
dered capable of immortality. 

The wicked, in the second death, unde- 
ceived in regard to all false happiness, and 
all lying immorality, will see the nothing- 
ness of them ; the favorite deceptions of 
this world will appear before him in all 
their miserable vanity, rendered a thousand 
times more evident by comparison with 
the realities of heaven ; he will exhaust 
himself in efforts to comprehend their an- 
cient charm, for ever vanished, and to ex- 
plain to himself how he could have de- 
ceived himself about them ; he was unhappy 
in the light, and preferred darkness because 
his deeds were evil, and he will be inundated 
with light from which he can no longer turn 
himself; an enemy of truth, he will con- 
template it unveiled for his confusion ; an 
enemy of faith, he will be forced to believe ; 



30 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



an enemy of God, he will see Him, and 
when the Gospel shall, in spite of himself, 
fill his thoughts, and present to him the im- 
age of Christ going from place to place to 
do good, he will recall that he never placed 
himself upon his passage, and he will 
know, but too late, that the right to em- 
brace His throne must be acquired in em- 
bracing His cross. 

The wicked, in the second death, will be 
impoverished, not by the loss of those per- 
ishable riches which seemed to him flesh of 
his flesh ; but by the privation of those 
treasures eternally rich, of which the Gospel 
speaks, in giving us at each moment, this 
solemn council, Be ye rich in God; he 
will be poor in God ; he will be indigent 
beside the abundance of immortality, and 
this deprivation, his own work, he will feel 
to the degree that, according to the figure 
of the parable, a drop of water to refresh 
his tongue would be a great treasure ; he 
will seek it without finding it, without ob- 
taining it, in despair then, that he had not 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



31 



listened to the voice, which cried near the 
impure sources where he drank in his folly, 
He ivho shall drink of the water that I shall 
give him, shall not thirst again. Sovereign 
good will be there before him, but beyond 
his reach ; he exacted imperiously, to the 
detriment of the rest of mankind, that noth- 
ing should be lacking to him, and in the 
impoverishment of the second death, it is 
not the earth, it is heaven, which will be 
wanting to him. 

The wicked, in the second death, will 
know that he might have lived, that he 
might have assured for himself life instead 
of death, and this forced recoil upon him- 
self, this certainty of suffering, in conse- 
quence of iniquities that he was free to 
avoid, will be a spring of unknown depth, 
from whence will flow through his breast 
regret upon regret, remorse after remorse. 
The worst of misfortunes, now, in this 
world, is to be miserable by one's own 
fault ; we already feel it, when our groans 
are so many cries of accusation, which rise 



32 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



from the depths of our consciences. What 
will it be, then, when the sinner shall have 
no means of escaping for a moment, from 
the heart-rending consciousness of having 
betrayed duties, whose sanctity will be writ- 
ten in ineffaceable and celestial characters 
everywhere around him ; when the morality 
at which he laughed shall be divinely man- 
ifested to him as divine ; when his thought, 
with an intensity like that which the great- 
est geniuses in this world consecrate to the 
solution of their most difficult problems, 
shall be constantly occupied in reiterating 
to himself that holy, holy, holy is the Al- 
mighty, and that it is this very holiness 
which he has outrageously offended ; he 
has lived upon vice, and he remembers it 
in the purity of immortality ; he has lived 
in egotism, and he is in presence of supreme 
charity ; he loved only himself, and he is in 
presence of infinite love ; he forgot God, 
and he sees this forgetfulness, and, like 
Dives with Lazarus, he compares himself 
to so many of his fellow-men who have 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



33 



loved, blessed, prayed, adored, and whose 
worship deposes and intercedes in their fa- 
vor before the Sovereign Judge ; he knows 
that in this treasure of acts of grace, of 
praise, of adoration, he would seek in vain 
for one praise, one blessing sprung from his 
heart; for while living, before his second 
death, occupied by his constant relations 
with those wicked like himself, he had none 
with God. 

Finally, brethren, the wicked in the sec- 
ond death are separated from the just. Do 
not think from this expression, that I con- 
tradict the principles previously exposed ; 
it is not of a separation in any way ma- 
terial that I speak ; we form a human spe- 
cies in the present life ; we shall still be the 
human species in the other ; how will our 
relations, enlarged and purified, rendered at 
the same time more intimate, more intel- 
lectual, and spiritualized for a more elevated 
existence, be renewed ? We know not ; 
we have no idea of the relations of the just 
among themselves ; none of those of the 
3 



34 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



wicked among themselves ; none above all 
of those of the just and the wicfked ; but 
faith and science demonstrate in concert 
the necessity of the reestablishment and 
continuation of relations between us ; with- 
out which humanity would no longer be 
found again, and each man would cease to 
be the man that he was. There will then 
be reunion, recognition in immortality, as 
for Moses and Elias on the summit of 
Mount Tabor. Nevertheless, a spiritual 
and religious separation must take place, 
between the good in their felicity, and the 
wicked in their suffering ; in saying to these : 
Withdraw from me, Jesus will remove them, 
morally, from the believers whom he re- 
ceives near to him ; after that, what serves 
a discussion on the obscurity of the means ; 
let us hold to the fact, and recognize that if 
death in this world separates, death in the 
next will separate still more ; recognize that 
the sinner labors with gayety of heart, to 
remove himself in eternity from those whom 
he cherishes. O, if those men, who of the 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



35 



virtues prescribed to the Christian have re- 
tained perhaps only a leaning towards the 
virtues of the family ; if those men who 
suffer themselves to be led away by the ex- 
cess of their passions, and who perhaps still 
know how to love, at least at times, would 
think, were it only from love, of their eter- 
nal destiny, and would say to themselves : 
In losing myself I lose the right to re- 
demand, and to seek again in heaven, those 
whom I most cherish ; in estranging myself 
from God, I estrange myself from them, 
and I voluntarily expose myself, to see my- 
self in the future life separated from the 
aged parents who have wept over my crim- 
inal youth, and from the benefactors who 
have perhaps replaced them ; from the moth- 
er of my children, to whom I promised my 
soul in exchange for hers, both immortal ; 
and from my sons and daughters, whom I 
swore to lead toward God, near to whom I 

might have awaited them ! Christians, 

if these after-thoughts of repentance, of love, 
and of hope, would spring up in time, there 



36 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



would be less iniquity in this life, less an- 
guish in the other, and the second death 
would find fewer bonds to sunder. 

This, brethren, is the parallel of the two 
deaths ; it remains for me to show you a 
difference which distinguishes them. 

The last reflections that you have just 
heard, have awakened perhaps in your 
minds, a doubt, that the study of the con- 
demnations of the future life often excites. 
Is the fate of the wicked fixed for ever, 
without resource, without hope, without 
return ? Is the second death definitive ? 
The eternity of punishment, this dogma 
which has caused so much terror, so much 
discussion and sarcasm, is it a truth or an 
error ? I design to treat this question in a 
succeeding discourse, and I shall tell you, 
with entire frankness, what the Gospel al- 
lows to be believed in regard to it. Mean- 
while, whatever opinion you may cherish 
on this subject, to whichever side your faith 
may lean, it will find nothing in its con- 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



37 



victions or its doubts which should weaken 
the certainty that, between the two deaths — 
that which carries us out of this world, and 
that which awaits us in the next — there is 
this difference : the second depends only 
upon ourselves ; powerless before the first, 
we have all power over the second ; one is 
obliged to die, not to live wrongly to die a 
second time ; in a word, of the terrestrial 
and temporal death, one may say to man, 
as Jesus to Peter : When thou shalt become 
old, thou shalt extend thy hands ; and another 
— Death, the King of Terrors — shall en- 
circle thee, and bear thee whither ihouwouldst 
not go ; but of the second death, one must 
say to him, In truth, thou encirclest thyself, 

and goest where thou wouldst ! Yes, 

we go where we wish, we go to heaven or 
to hell, to the future life or to the second 
death, to the resurrection of life or to the 
resurrection of condemnation, and hell has 
over us only the power that we give it. 
Admirable liberty of the Christian ! his im- 
mortality is much more at his disposition 



38 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



than his life. Without doubt, the truly- 
wise, the true believer, shapes his own des- 
tiny ; above all, if he have learned the great 
art of sufficing to himself, of not accepting 
any dependence at any price, of being con- 
tent with little, and of remembering daily 
that he is mortal, and in virtue of this prin- 
ciple, not to live from day to day in a fool- 
ish improvidence and easy indolence, but 
to live according to the rule, Sufficient unto 
the day is the evil thereof. 

And yet how many natural dependen- 
ces, from which the most moderate in his 
habits, and the most confiding in Provi- 
dence, does not escape ! One may indeed 
say : I have need of no one ; the expres- 
sion is too cold and too arrogant to be 
always true ; who needs not to love and 
be loved ? No, no ; no one isolates him- 
self altogether ; no one dispenses with all 
his fellow-creatures, and one may form his 
destiny, less in choosing it than in ac- 
cepting it, such as it falls to us by lot. 
Man partly makes his mortal fate ; 



THE SECOND DEATH, 



39 



but he shapes completely the immortal; 
his lot on the earth depends but half 
upon himself, his lot in heaven depends 
upon himself entirely ; he arranges it ac- 
cording to his will ; he prepares it in a man- 
ner that cannot fail ; here below he is what 
events make him, he will be, in immortality, 
what he chooses to be, and more than con- 
queror t by Christ who fortifies, he can place 
himself in a condition to say to the second 
death, as tranquilly as to the first : O death ! 
where is thy sting ? He who does not dis- 
pose of a few instants of life, disposes of 
all the ages of immortality, and the mo- 
ment of his last breath brings him the as- 
surance that he has not deceived himself; 
he dies only to live again ; he dies without 
having given a hold to the second death ; 
he dies knowing that his end is a progress ; 
thus he dies in peace, and enters into ce- 
lestial peace ; he dies in holiness, and en- 
ters into holiness eternal ; he dies in glory, 
and enters into glory ; he dies in truth, and 
he penetrates it and sees it again ; he dies 



40 



THE SECOND DEATH. 



in love, and enters into the emotions and 
joys of that love which shall never end. O 
my brethren ! may these touching and 
splendid assurances persuade you of your 
responsibility toward yourselves ; possess 
yourselves of heaven ; it is the earnest ones 
who obtain it ; if you do not cast your- 
selves away, nothing will ruin you ; and 
closing the ear to all the falsities of the 
world, which distract you from reliance 
upon Heaven, listen, listen to the Saviour, 
he who has overcome the first death in or- 
der to give you the means of overcoming 
and avoiding the second, hear him say to 
the humblest and poorest among you : Do 

these things and thou shalt live ! If 

you obey this supreme injunction, the same 
voice will say to you at your last hour, I 
live and thou shalt live ! 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



"Let him that hath ears hearken to what the Spirit saith to the 
churches : He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second 
death."— Apocalypse ii. 11. 

My Brethren, — 

Is the second death definitive ? Are the 
punishments of the future life eternal ? 

Philosophy, with the boldness of discus- 
sion in which it delights, has recently pro- 
posed to itself the delicate and difficult 
question, of knowing how religions end ; it 
would, perhaps, have done better, and would 
have given itself a more useful task, in ex- 
amining how beliefs end ; it would have 
discovered, that, in the history of a dogma, 
above all, if it has occupied attention for a 
long time, if it has traversed centuries, if it 



42 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



has had a strong hold upon the human 
mind, there are three distinct epochs. Dur- 
ing the first, the dogma reigns and imposes 
itself upon the conscience ; one doubts only 
in secret, it is attacked feebly or by a side 
issue, one avoids making open war upon it, 
and it defends itself imperiously; it gives 
its true name without anxiety, it does 
not flinch from any of its consequences, 
terrible or not ; it suffers no attenuation, 
and accepts no compromise ; it retains its 
place among the fundamental doctrines of 
the faith or necessities for salvation, and it 
frankly stigmatizes its adversaries with the 
name of heretics. In time, this great noise 
subsides, this authority diminishes, and 
there comes a second epoch, when the dog- 
ma, secretly attacked by conscience, by rea- 
son, by the most legitimate affections of 
the human heart, is finally attacked in the 
name of the revelation in which it was 
supposed to be taught ; attacked openly, it 
defends itself badly, it speaks lower, some- 
times changes its name ; it loses its apolo- 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 43 



gists every day ; it ceases to be considered 
as indispensable to salvation, before it comes 
to be rejected as false ; its last partisans 
explain and extenuate to such a degree as 
to render it unrecognizable by its inventors ; 
it is displaced from faith, and inclosed in 
the domain of pure science, it leaves more 
and more that of preaching ; and thus, by 
a slow but sure progress, by a tacit but sin- 
cere consent, the Christian mind arrives at 
a third epoch, in which the dogma finally 
dies ; when it is dead, even in the Church 
which, at its rise, had placed it at the base 
of its faith, it is effaced from all consciences, 
it is erased from all the books, it is absent 
from all the pulpits ; it is no longer re- 
marked, except by its absence, by the aston- 
ishment it excites in the minds of those 
who remember it, to the degree that one 
asks himself how it was possible that it 
could have been believed in heretofore. 

The examples are numerous in support 
of this march of the Christian faith across 
the phases and developments of Chris- 



44 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



tianity, and these examples are from all the 
churches. To confine myself to the most 
striking, is not this the history of the dog- 
ma of predestination, that is to say, of the 
dreadful doctrine according to which God, 
by a foregone and irrevocable decree, has 
given to each man and each Christian his 
eternal destiny, and marks him, before his 
birth, with the ineffaceable seal of a re- 
demption which it is impossible to lose, or 
of perdition, impossible to avoid ? What 
has become of this dogma so destructive to 
moral liberty, admitted by Luther, devel- 
oped by Calvin, formulated in all the old 
confessions of faith, consecrated more 
strongly than ever at the synod of Dor- 
drecht, which called itself the oecumenical 
council of Protestantism ? Who believes it 
among us at the present day ? Who accepts 
it, and dares to apply it to himself or to 
others, and to live in accordance ? It has 
passed through the three periods necessary 
to the domination of a dogma over the 
human thought ; it has reigned and strug- 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



45 



gled ; then it has been observed to fail and 
lose utterance ; now, one may say that it is 
dead ; for if, for a miracle, it still has be- 
lievers, at least it no longer has defenders. 
In the Catholic Church, the same vicissitudes 
of power and discredit are found on the 
subject of the famous dogma : Out of the 
Church there is no salvation ! The number 
of the believers of this sect, who still un- 
derstand it as it was understood amidst the 
religious ignorance and fury of the Middle 
Ages, or under the thunders of the anathe- 
mas of the Council of Trent, diminishes 
every day ; the constant endeavor is to 
mitigate it more and more, to find excep- 
tions to it, to limit its rigor ; it is in vain 
that bulls and briefs attempt to reanimate 
it, so to say, to bring it out from the desue- 
tude of oblivion, to bring back the con- 
sciences which turn from it with a holy re- 
pugnance ; and if it is not dead, be sure 
that it is beginning to die. And that great 
error, which was Protestant and is still 
Catholic, the perdition of infants dying 



46 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



without baptism, punished in consequence 
of the negligence of their relations who did 
not present them for the sacrament, or still 
more, for the negligence of Providence, 
who did not suffer them to live long enough 
to receive it ; that dogma, preserved by our 
Church at the origin of the Reformation, 
and which the Roman Church would still 
maintain, brethren, who believes in it with 
entire confidence ; who receives it in its 
plenitude ; and what Christian heart, what 
heart of father or mother above all, does 
not find a sufficient refutation of it in this 
expression of Jesus : Suffer little children to 
come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of 

God ? Such is the constant march 

of the human mind : when genius and fa- 
naticism, aiding each other with so much 
the more force, that they do it conscien- 
tiously, teach it an error, it believes ; then 
it is astonished at its belief, and begins to 
doubt ; finally, it believes no longer ; it has 
vanquished error, it has conquered truth, 
and gained one of its most admirable and 
most pacific victories. 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



47 



The more I listen to the rumors of the 
day, and to the voice of the Church, and 
the more I attempt to sound the conscience 
of the present century, the more I incline to 
believe that the dogma of the eternity of 
punishment is, at the present time, between 
the second and third period of its march ; 
it has begun to be put aside, it is more and 
more in a minority in Christendom, and 
loses its believers every day ; it is attacked 
but little, but it is defended still less ; em- 
barrassed still, not by the arguments, but 
by the expressions which support it, the 
Christian conscience seeks to disengage it- 
self from it, and endeavors to thrust it into 
oblivion. 

The moment, then, is propitious for our 

untrammelled preaching to discuss it 

Brethren, I call you to this examination in 
your quality of disciples of free examina- 
tion. The question has been often taken 
on a false issue ; it has been confined too 
much to showing only that the nature of 
God is repugnant to it : without neglecting 



> 



48 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



this great and just idea, I am about to en- 
deavor, above all, to show you, that this 
doctrine is not less irreconcilable with the 
nature of man. Bring to this research a 
spirit freed from all prejudice, from all pre- 
vious belief, from all subjection to tradition ; 
according to the precept of your Divine 
Master : Know the truths and the truth will 
make you free, free from all superstition, 
and all servitude of belief. 

I. It seems indispensable to begin by 
settling a doubt and reassuring a scruple, 
which might disturb your attention during 
the whole discourse ; the one is, as to the 
terms of which the Gospel makes use, in 
speaking of the punishments of the future 
life ; the other, more grave, would interest 
morality in the maintenance of the dogma 
of eternal punishment. 

In this examination, how do you dis- 
pose, it is asked, of the famous text : The 
wicked will go into eternal punishment, and 
the just to eternal life ? Evidently, if this 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



49 



passage has the sense in reality that it pre- 
sents in appearance in our translations, 
there is nothing to call in question, and the 
discussion is ended as soon as commenced. 
But, it is certain, it is recognized, that the 
word eternal has not always, and it must 
be so, in the tongue of the New Testament, 
the signification that our modern tongues 
give it ; it does not always express the 
idea of perpetuity or eternity ; often it is 
only the opposite of the word temporal, and 
designates simply the future life in contrast 
with the present life, independently of all 
idea of length, permanence, or duration. A 
simple comparison of numerous texts in 
which this word appears makes this evi- 
dent. I cannot, in the pulpit, make re- 
searches with you in philology and gram- 
mar, and I spare you all these details ; I 
have shown and discussed them in a book * 
known to many among you, and if I ven- 
ture to recall it here, it is only to shelter 



* Experimental Christianity. 

4 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



myself from all suspicion of wishing to 
evade a difficulty, which, in reality, is not 
one. I shall go still further, and to state 
my whole thought, who will believe that 
the eternity of punishment, a doctrine of 
such terrible and grave importance, can de- 
pend, in any sense, upon trifles of criticism, 
upon variations of translation ? It is a 
first legitimate prejudice against such a 
dogma, the necessity of giving it such sup- 
port, and I cannot but think that if it was 
taught in the Gospel, it would be done with 
a clearness so terrible that we should all 
tremble at it, but not dispute it. 

II. Beware, some one will say to me on 
the other hand, if you abolish hell at the 
end of a certain time, if you permit the re- 
sources of grace to show beyond the tomb, 
you take away from morality its most use- 
ful sanction ; you take from the command- 
ment of God that which gives it its power, 
in giving it . its terror ; men will cease to fear 
torments which must finish ; they will think 
much less of their anguish than of their 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



51 



end ; the wicked, reassured, will persist at 
their ease in their wickedness, and you steal 
something of its value even from heaven, 
in letting it appear that with time all the 
world will take a place there Breth- 
ren, this objection, or more correctly speak- 
ing, this foresight, is specious ; but what 
does it offer that is well founded ? Regard 
the many centuries that the dogma of the 
eternity of punishment has been taught 
by the Church ; for ages man has re- 
mained content with professing it, with- 
out examining it closely enough ; in com- 
parison with the duration of its reign, 
there is but little time that it has been 
doubted, and that any one has prepared 
himself to deny it ; and certainly, from the 
manner in which the sinners and ungodly 
of all ages of Christianity have braved an 
eternal hell, and have hastened thither, so 
to say, with gayety of heart, it would seem 
difficult to brave still more a hell which is 
not eternal. Still further, the argument 
may be retorted ; it may be allowed to be 



52 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



maintained, that men have often shown 
this foolhardy carelessness of eternal pun- 
ishment, because they instinctively disbe- 
lieved it ; and that sinners will be better 
brought back to duty, the ungodly to relig- 
ion, and egotists to charity, if they have in 
prospect chastisements which are not per- 
petual, in which they will believe, rather 
than this perpetuity of suffering, which 
finds them incredulous. But the objection 
is better refuted by a principle, the evidence 
of which is incontestable, and of which we 
above all, disciples of the Reformation, 
ought never to lose sight ; the truth is man's 
affair, the consequences of truth are the af- 
fair of God Under the empire of the 

passions, man may turn everything to evil, 
even religion, since, among other fruits that 
it disavows, he has forced out religious 
wars ; Revelation is, perhaps, the book of 
which he has made the worst usage ; he 
abuses its morality, and makes of it casuis- 
try ; its authority, and enslaves the thoughts 
by it ; of its liberty he makes anarchy ; he 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



53 



abuses its gentle and holy Christian equal- 
ity, and makes of it a thousand absurd and 
shameless systems of levelling and division. 
How argue from these excesses against the 
purity of the source from which they have 
been made to spring ? It would be to ac- 
cuse the sun for the conflagrations that one 
may light from his rays. The assurance 
which suffices alone to console and fortify 
the friend and defender of truth, when he 
deplores, among the foremost, the use which 
iniquity or hypocrisy make of it, is, I re- 
peat, that truth is our right, our aim, the 
object of bur legitimate researches, the task 
and glory of our life, the occupation of our 
intelligence, the foundation even of our 
faith ; its possible consequences do not re- 
gard us, and cannot arrest us ; they are the 
affair of God, and it is fon him to provide 
for them. No religious truth, then, is im- 
prudent, and to deny these fundamental 
rules is to go directly to the system of two 
Gospels and two Christianities, one for the 
feeble, the other for the strong ; it is to con- 



54 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



secrate the system of secret doctrines ; and 
one of the glories of the Gospel is not to 
offer the least trace of such ; it is to accuse 
Jesus Christ of imprudence, since he wished 
his teachings to be told and reiterated, not 
in the ear, but from the house-tops. 

I accept the discussion, then, on the truth 
or falsity of these beliefs, not upon their 
danger ; certain, that if they are true, they 
have nothing dangerous ; certain, that if I 
could place everything in light, I should put 
nothing in peril. Lastly, it would be quite 
unworthy of disciples of the liberty of con- 
science and faith, and of the right of ex- 
amination ; it would be quite unworthy 
of the successors of those firm Christians 
who, believing in predestination, did not 
fear that this doctrine even would be in- 
jurious to the Reformation ; it would be 
altogether unworthy of all of us who be- 
lieve only in God, in Christ, in the Gospel, 
and in ourselves, to alarm ourselves with 
the consequences of the discovery and man- 
ifestation of the truth ; let us have a more 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



55 



just confidence in it; it can never injure, 
for it is but the thought of God ; when 
man reaches it, he thinks what God him- 
self thinks, and the thought of God is al- 
ways holy and perfect like himself. 

Thus, brethren, truth is not dangerous,— 
above all, if it touches morality, — except 
when we take only the half of it. Let us 
force ourselves to seize it entire, and let us 
begin by placing in relief the principles 
which form the groundwork of the question. 

III. An immortality and responsibility 
for each, these are the two certainties that 
you all recognize, and in the discourse 
which opened the way for this one I re- 
called to you how certain is this immor- 
tality, how terrible is this responsibility. 
Of this assurance of a future life, of this 
foreknowledge of a sentence which awaits 
us there, nothing will remain, nothing at 
least which could satisfy our reason, our 
conscience, our faith, if you do not admit 
that such as a man dies, such he lives again. 
There is no immortality except with iden- 



56 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



tity ; death takes from us nothing of our 
being, nothing of our personality ; we leave 
nothing of ourselves in the sepulchre, and 
man, the individual man, finds himself 
again complete. The history of each of 
us may be resumed in two very simple 
phrases, which embrace the present and all 
the future : I am, and I shall be ; I am, is 
life ; I shall be, is immortality, and the 
first is not more sure than the second. 
Moreover, to give to these two expressions 
all their weight, it is necessary to add 
something to the affirmation ; they must be 
still more marked in an immortal sense, 
and we must say : It is I who am, and I 
who will be ; I with all the tendencies of 
my mind, I with my faculties, reason, con- 
science, sensibility, imagination, love ; I 
with my progress, recollections, my admira- 
tions and affections ; I with my personal 
choice of happiness. Undoubtedly, estab- 
lished during this life over few things, ac- 
cording to the words of Jesus, ive shall be 
over many, in the future life ; the secret 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



57 



powers of our soul will be enlarged, as will 
be the horizon of our activity, our sphere of 
happiness, our capacity of adoration and 
faith ; everything in us will be grand, like 
heaven and like immortality ; but a new 
being will not substitute itself for our be- 
ing ; the individuality will be permanent, 
and, as the Saviour himself said to his Fa- 
ther, " I am here, to do thy will" each of 
us, having always full consciousness of him- 
self, called in his turn, will be able to reply : 
I am here ! 

This incontestable fact, which alone gives 
a meaning to life, to death, and immortality, 
is in complete accordance with the principle 
recognized in our preceding contemplation : 
hell is in the heart of the sinner ; it is from 
this double point of view, of individuality 
in the future life, and the spirituality of its 
pains, that it is proper to study the measure 
of these last. 

IV. Man is an active being, his activity 
is persistent ; he never stops, he cannot do 
so ; his thought ignores repose, he thinks 



58 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



always ; his conscience abdicates not, it 
judges ceaselessly ; his sensibility does not 
annul itself, it is excited continually, and 
continually receives new emotions ; his im- 
agination always in play, constantly de- 
picts to itself things different from the re- 
ality, and always draws him out of the 
actual towards the possible. To stop, to 
cease to act, to think, to judge, to feel, this 
would not be for him death ; it would be 
annihilation, the complete cessation of ex- 
istence, nothingness in all its simplicity ; 
this activity which carries him away, is his 
existence itself ; to live, for him, is to act ; 
he is not, but on condition of being active. 
We count our days by minutes, by seconds; 
they should be reckoned by thoughts and 
emotions ; for it is from thoughts to thoughts, 
and emotions to emotions, varied infinitely, 
and succeeding each other with an incalcu- 
lable rapidity, that we live. Recognize in 
these features all our moral grandeur as 
man, and the sanctity of our vocation as 
Christian : man is thus active, because he 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



59 



was created in the image of God ; like God, 
he acts always ; my Father, said Jesus, 
works continually, and, according to St. 
Paul, we are co-workers ivith God. Away, 
then, away with all idea of indolence, of 
inertia, of inactivity ; every such idea is 
contrary to the nature of God, and to our 
own, contrary also to the intention of Christ ; 
he has prescribed to us, he has taught us, 
to aspire to be perfect as God our Heavenly 
Father is perfect, holy as He is holy, pity- 
ing- as He is pitying ; that is to say, that 
Humanity wandered at hazard in the ways 
of error and perdition, and Jesus has opened 
to us a road that sin and deceit held closed 
before us, the path of the infinite, of per- 
fection, of sovereign good and love ; we are 
all in march towards God, each at his own 
pace ; but we march always, in spite of the 
fatigues, the delays, the digressions, and the 
falls ; some advance and approach ; others 
turn aside and withdraw themselves ; but 
all, without a single exception, are ever in 
movement, because they are men, because 



/ 



60 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



no one can divest himself of his nature, 
because life is a flame, and flame is made 
to ascend. 

Can you represent to yourself a be- 
ing thus constituted, a being who is never 
at rest, or stationary ; plunged into tor- 
ments, eternal and eternally the same, 
without shade of variation or change ? 
The idea of everlasting torments evidently 
carries with it that of their eternal identity ; 
they are from the first moment what they 
will be for ever, and they will not change 
the least anguish ; for if they change, it is to 
augment or diminish ; every variety of suf- 
fering, however one understands it, is an 
attenuation or an aggravation, and if the 
torments may augment, they may dimin- 
ish ; if they can decrease, they may go 
on growing lighter by degrees, until they 
disappear entirely. No subterfuge of rea- 
soning will deceive you on this point ; 
either the torments are not eternal, or if 
they are so, the ages pass on, accumulate, 
heap up, and new ones are always advan- 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



61 



cing, and there is no longer means of count- 
ing them ; their name changes and is ef- 
faced ; they call themselves only eternity, 
and in these incommensurable periods of 
duration these torments have not varied to 
either more or less a single one of the pains 
which they inflict. » Is it possible to figure 
to one's self man, essentially active and 
changing, thus restrained and arrested in an 
eternal immobility of suffering ? How ! 
He is there, he of whom it is true to say, 
that such as he dies such he lives again, he 
is there with his thoughts always ready to 
spring forward, with his consciousness al- 
ways urging him toward good or evil, with 
his sensibility ever awake to enjoy or to 
suffer, and all these springs of his being, 
always so prompt to act, are eternally com- 
pressed beneath an immovable burden of 
torments ; he, so active, is inactive to this 
degree in the other life, which is only a con- 
tinuation of this ; he who in the present 
succeeds only by effort in not changing both 
thoughts and emotions with each instant, 



62 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



will have, during eternity, only one thought, 
one emotion, that of the same torment ; he, 
always in march until then, will stop short 
for ever from the time that he shall stumble 
over the stone of the sepulchre ! After so 
much activity on this side of the tomb, such 
a stagnation on the other; after so much 
diversity, such a monotony, such a satiety 
of suffering; after so many transports in 
every sense, such an inertia of the will ! 
No, brethren, this is placing immor- 
tality in contradiction with life ; it takes 
away from resuscitated man the nature 
that he brings with him ; it imagines a hell 
contrary to human nature ; such as man 
dies, such he lives again, and as man he 
will suffer. 

V. It is not alone in view of human na- 
ture in general that the eternity of punish- 
ment is an error. Sent by God, endured 
by man, all suffering should have a pur- 
pose ; the eternity of punishment takes 
from it the only aim that the perfection of 
God and the faculties of man permit to be 
recognized in it, correction. 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 63 



All suffering is odious to our celestial 
Father ; He created no world for the first 
death, or the second ; He has created, only 
from love ; He has created, only to render 
happy, and when moral, intellectual, affec- 
tionate, and believing beings are concerned, 
virtue, truth, tenderness, and faith are the 
means, the conditions, the degrees of this 
happiness. The being who suffers, suffers 
from his own fault, not from the fault of 
God, and he suffers in proportion to his 
fault ; he suffers because he refused, he and 
his race, to follow the paths of felicity that 
God in his goodness had opened to him, 
because he sought deceitful and false joys, 
because lie lent an ear to the perfidious 
voices which say : Become weary of being 
men, and you shall become as gods ; thus, 
aspiring to too much, he fell to less. That 
this just proportion of punishments and 
offences is maintained in the other life, and 
that there are as many hells as degrees of 
perversity, is the positive teaching of the 
Saviour, when he declares that each shall 



64 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



reap according as he has sown, that there 
will be demanded of each one according 
to what has been given to him, and that 
Tyre and Sidon, at the day of judgment, 
will be treated less rigorously than Beth- 
saida and Corazin. "Without stopping to 
ask how this exact proportion between the 
transgressions and the chastisements, can 
subsist under the stroke of punishment 
equally eternal for all, my brethren, observe 
that God takes no pleasure in the anguish 
of his creatures, that God does not avenge 
himself, that the vengeance attributed to 
him is only a figure, like the repentance of 
God, and the anger of God; in a word, 
that God does not punish for the sake of 
punishing ; thence, recognize that he pun- 
ishes only to correct. It is impossible, un- 
less one amuses himself with phrases, or 
voluntarily blinds himself, by placing on a 
level the Divine justice and the imperfect 
justice of men, which is only a precaution 
of security, it is impossible to attribute to a 
God infinitely good, who is charity itself, 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 65 

who loves all his children with an equal 
love ; any other intention, when he permits 
evil to bring evil, and the wicked to be pun- 
ished, than to correct him, to confound and 
bring him back, to convert him, and give 
him a heaven in place of a hell. Yes, all 
suffering sent by the celestial Father to his 
children is a lesson, or else it is irreconcila- 
ble with his most evident attributes 

If the torments are eternal, and eternally 
similar, there is no lesson ; there is no longer 
any use in suffering ; there is no longer any 
progress to attempt ; there is no longer any- 
thing but a perpetual despair, which may 
hate and blaspheme at its ease ; for it neither 
loses nor gains anything by cherishing, or 
abstaining from, hate and blasphemy ; the 
fate of the condemned changes not, nor his 
heart any more ; for ever miserable, he is 
for ever wicked. This hell, is it reconcila- 
ble, I ask, with the perfection of God and 
the mercy of Christ ? I am so intimately 
persuaded to the contrary, that I would 
5 



66 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



much rather not believe in hell, than believe 
that it teaches nothing. 

In consulting the nature of man, we 
shall find there the same truth, so cer- 
tain is it that the study of God and that 
of man, here, are in accordance. Man, 
gifted with self-consciousness, man, who 
has the power of knowing and of analyz- 
ing himself, of rendering an account to 
himself of his most intimate emotions, and 
of knowing from whence they come to him, 
can he suffer without knowing, without 
comprehending why he suffers? Evidently 
not ; this would again be to deny our rea- 
son, our conscience, our religiousness (re- 
ligiosite) ; one does not injure himself with- 
out an idea of the evil that he does ; one 
does not ruin himself without an idea that 
he has thrown himself away; author of his 
evil deeds, the sinner will know, as we have 
sufficiently seen, that he is the author of 
the punishment that he undergoes ; the 
damned understand that they have damned 
themselves. Hence, unless man ceases to 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



67 



be man, it is impossible that this return 
upon himself should be eternally sterile ; it 
is impossible that a lesson should be eter- 
nal and useless ; it is impossible that the 
torments of hell should teach nothing to 
the unfortunates who are cast therein. It 
is said they have remorse, and not repent- 
ance. Brethren, let us not transport into 
hell our disputes about words ; employ 
whatever term you wish ; remorse, repent- 
ance, regret, despair, even ; it remains true, 
that the invincible certainty of suffering by 
one's own fault, and without being able to 
complain in the least of God, is something 
profoundly moral, profoundly religious ; this 
idea, ever present, cannot be for ever power- 
less ; it must, sooner or later, and by de- 
grees, act upon the heart, and if the repro- 
bate, who thus judges himself, attains, by 
dint of anguish and reflection, to a first 
movement of repentance or of pity, like 
that of Dives for his brethren, however fee- 
ble, confused, and rapid it may be, it is 
enough ; the doctrine which I preach to you 



68 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



is the truth ; this movement is an effort, a 
return, a progress, and from that instant, in 
virtue of the holy law of proportions, he 
suffers less, his unhappiness has diminished 
with its malignity; and you would deny 
that this first step may conduct him farther ; 
you would pretend that it is impossible, 
morally, religiously, divinely impossible, 
that he can take a second ; you would be- 
lieve that God closes the way to him ; he 
has begun to raise himself, God would in- 
fallibly cast him down again, God would 
replunge him, so to say, into this hell, from 
which he had begun to see, no one knows 
at what distance, the exit ! No, brethren, 
this would contradict the universal and su- 
preme law of progress, the inflexible law 
that good produces good^ and evil produces 
evil ; the fundamental law of the activity 
of free beings, an activity which is every- 
where, on earth, in heaven, in hell. You 
see, then, eternity is too long to be filled 
only with punishments ; it is not so for re- 
pentance and virtue. 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



69 



VI. The wicked &re not the only ones 
interested in the question ; it is still to be 
regarded from the point of view of the in- 
terest of the just. We have seen that 
whatever obscurity necessarily hangs over 
the relations of the wicked and the just, 
these relations subsist ; without which hu- 
man identity is destroyed, and it is no longer 
true to say that such as man dies he lives 
again ; we have seen that a separation, 
spiritual in some degree, must nevertheless 
be established between them, in virtue of 
the profound difference of their situations. 
All this is mysterious, but it is certain ; for 
it cannot be that man should not be always 
man, and even if you reduce this resump- 
tion of relations beyond the tomb to a sim- 
ple mutual recollection, to a mere knowl- 
edge of the fate one of another, behold the 
irresistible consequence which imposes it- 
self upon the mind : if hell is irremissible 
and invariable, if the punishment is eternal, 
if it is impossible for one to raise himself, 
the happiness of the just is troubled, and 



70 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



you can no longer give them the name of 
blessed. What, the just shall be in heaven ? 
— that is to say, occupied, according to the 
promises of the Gospel, with a felicity an- 
swering to all the tendencies of their na- 
ture, with a felicity without alloy, — you add 
to it the alloy of the certainty that a pro- 
digious number of their fellow-creatures, 
and among this number how many per- 
haps may be brothers whom they have 
known, friends wliom they have loved, who 
are destined to these torments without va- 
riation or solace, without prospect of ter- 
mination, without shade of hope, — and you 
will succeed in persuading yourself, that 
the felicity of the just will still be perfect ! 
Ah ! this would be transporting egotism 
into their heaven ; this would be to wish 
that they should console themselves for the 
hell of others, by the thought that they 
have escaped it ; to attribute to them the 
joy of the sceptical heathen, contemplating 
a shipwreck from the security of a harbor, 
and the ideas of egotism and perfect fe- 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 71 



licity exclude one another ; selfishness is a 
vice ; far from assuring, it would injure the 
happiness even of the heavens. To say 
that the saints accustom themselves to the 
idea of eternal punishment, because they 
suffer what God suffers, is to talk nonsense, 
and evade the question ; to say that they 
admire the justice and holiness of God in 
the everlasting penalties, to the degree that 
they feel no grief at it, is to forget that faith 
and love are distinct sentiments of the hu- 
man heart; to say, finally, that their affec- 
tion and pity are absorbed in the contem- 
plation of the Divinity, and that the mem- 
ory of their brethren has no longer a place 
in their minds, occupied entirely with God, 
is to deny human nature, where there is al- 
ways a place for every thing human. I 
conceive that the just, in the glory and 
peace which have become their lot, conform 
themselves humbly and piously to the moral 
necessity, that, as good produces good for 
some, evil produces evil for others, and I 
shall even go so far as to maintain that hell 



72 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



itself is necessary to the happiness of the 
just ; if there were none, if the worker of 
iniquity did not come to punishment, they 
would no longer understand that the good 
man would attain recompense ; this would 
occasion an immense disorder in the relig- 
ious and moral world, which would poison 
their happiness by making them ungrateful 
to God. But it is a very different thing to be 
placed before the punishment, which serves 
for a lesson, and leaves hope, and that which 
serves only vengeance, and leaves no hope ; 
and vainly, vainly will you endeavor to es- 
cape from the bounds of this dilemma ; either 
the just have forcibly forgotten even the ex- 
istence of their condemned friends, and the 
man who lives again is no longer the man 
who has lived ; another being has taken 
his place, and the world, heaven, and hell, 
are wholly changed ; or they recall their 
earthly relations, and then if hell is eternal, 
what becomes of their happiness ? To be- 
lieve in it still would be a calumniation of 
heaven, and how will it be, my brethren, if, 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



73 



leading you out of 'these generalities, I 
bring up to yourselves these terrible antici- 
pations ; if, after having put the question, 
How many are called ? the Gospel say- 
ing, Many, and how many are chosen ? the 
Gospel replying, Few, I demand of you to 
make this calculation in considering, not hu- 
manity, not Christendom, but nearer, around 
you, beside you, perhaps among your con- 
temporaries to whom God has given nearly 
the same epoch of birth and death, in order 
that you might love one another ; among 
your co-religionists, who have partaken with 
you the bread and wine of the same com- 
munion ; among your fellow-citizens, who 
with you have cultivated the soil of the 
same country, joyed in its triumphs, and 

wept its disasters, and let us narrow 

the circle : look among your connections, 
perhaps the dearest, your co-disciples, your 
fellow-laborers, your relations, all the assist- 
ants of your life, and once more con- 
tract the circle : look among your bene- 
factors and friends, look even into the 



74 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



bosom of your family, and tell me, tell me 
if you conceive the eternal happiness of 
heaven for s6me, beside the everlasting 
misery of hell for others, all still recogniz- 
ing one another ? No, no, you no longer 
imagine it ; this heaven and this hell are 
equally out of harmony with human nature, 
and thence equally impossible. The only 
doctrine which accords with the spirit of 
God and with our spirit, which restores all 
things to their true places in this life and 
in the next, which takes from salvation no 
one of its pure joys, from condemnation 
none of its just anguish, from our souls no 
one of their faculties, from Christ none of 
his mercies, nor from God no one of his 
perfections, is the doctrine which shows to 
us the blessed, awaiting that which the ce- 
lestial Father himself awaits, — the repent- 
ance, the uprising, and the return of the 
wicked. "With this perspective, all is ex- 
plained ; the menaces of the Gospel as well 
as its promises ; the fruits of the redemp- 
tion as well as its sanction. And do not 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



75 



stop here to make a miserable and petty 
account of days, years, and centuries. Do 
not throw these superstitions across the 
grave into the next life. Do not forget 
that the question here is only of immor- 
tality, that immortality is not reckoned, 
and that, thanks and glory be to God ! 

what -are equally unreckoned, are the 

joys of the just, and the mercies of the 
Lord. 

The Gospel, brethren, confirms, with the 
degree of precision and clearness that the 
matter at this epoch required, the doctrine 
of this discourse. St. Paul writes to the 
Ephesians : God has made known to us the 
secret of his will, to reunite all the human 
race in Christ; and with still more force, he 
announces to the Corinthians an epoch, 
which he is careful not to particularize, 
when God will be all in all. Measure at- 
tentively the extent of this teaching : After, 
says the Apostle, all things shall have been 
subjected to the Son, the Son himself will be 



76 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



subjected to the Father, that God may be all 
in all. This last text, which cannot be re- 
stricted to time and the world, which ex- 
tends itself over immortality, and places it, 
so to speak, entire beneath our eyes, is de- 
cisive, and contradicts an eternal hell. The 
entire spirit of the Christian religion is op- 
posed to it with the same clearness. My 
brethren, bring to me here, if it were possi- 
ble, a neophyte, a stranger, to whom Chris- 
tianity should be totally unknown, as un- 
known as the style of religion of the in- 
habitants of all the worlds with which the 
firmament is peopled, and before you I 
would say to him simply : Christianity is a 
religion of love, from its first to its last 
word ; Christianity teaches that creation is 
a work of love, that God loved us first, 
and that he creates to render happy ; also, 
God is therein represented as the common 
Father of men, loving them all with an 
equal paternal tenderness ; and humanity, 
as a family of brothers, called to love one 
another first in this world, in order the better 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



77 



to love one another in a better world ; and 
when this family of God lo^t itself by with- 
drawing from Him, God, in his infinite 
mercy, sent to it a Saviour, whose mission 
is one of love only ; free in his eternal and 
divine glory to refuse or fulfil the message 
of salvation, this Saviour, from love, ac- 
cepted it, and fulfilled it to the point of dy- 
ing on the cross, in order to confirm it; 
from the foot of this cross, and the door of 
his tomb, from which a resurrection de- 
livered him, there has spread itself across 
the ages a doctrine which is love alone, that 
of loving one's neighbor as himself, and 
doing to others as we would that they 
should do to us ; and the divine crowning 
of this mission, and this morality, is to love 
God with all the heart, with all the soul, 

with all the strength Behold the two 

great commandments, similar to each other, 
behold the summary of all the law, behold 
Christianity ; and what would the neophyte 
say, until then astonished and moved by so 
much joy, tenderness, and hope, poured, so 



78 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



to say, in floods upon the earth, when one 
should say to hirji that this religion, so mild, 
ended in the idea of a hell of eternal tor- 
tures, prepared for how many men 

I pause, and wish not to resume the 

reckoning already made Christians ! 

with what grievous surprise would you see 
the stranger seized! Free from all precon- 
ceived idea, how would he pause with stupe- 
faction before this end of Christianity, and 
soon, thrown out of himself, with an irre- 
sistible confidence in God our Father, and 
Jesus our Saviour, how would he tranquilly, 
protest against this impossible future, and 
would exclaim in an enthusiasm of charity : 
That is but an error of theology, and not a 
revelation of the Gospel ! And it is not 
alone the Christian peace of our souls here 
below, and the celestial peace of our souls 
in immortality, which render necessary this 
explanation of immortality and hope re- 
stored to hell, from whence they had been 
banished. 

The glory of the Redeemer of the world 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



79 



is compromised by the opposite doctrine, as 
much as our joy and love. To^ believe in 
an eternal hell as well as an eternal heaven, 
is to bring to the same level the power of 
evil and falsehood, and that of goodness 
and truth ; it is to deny that virtue has an 
internal and irresistible force, which event- 
ually will overcome evil ; it is to deny 
that truth ought to outweigh error. Is it 
worthy of the God of holiness and truth, 
worthy of him who is the express image of 
his glory, and who alone could say, I am 
the truth) to have disposed the moral and 
religious world in such a manner, that this 
equilibrium should be maintained from age 
to age, and that evil and falsehood should 
sustain for ever a victorious struggle against 
virtue and truth ? No, decidedly not ; and 
I ask you, is it administering to the glory 
of Jesus to say to him: Thy redemption 
stops for man at the tomb ; powerful on 
this side, it is powerless beyond ; it loses 
itself, so to speak, in the dust of the sepul- 
chre, in the night of death ; its efficacy lasts 



80 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



for the duration of human life only ; beyond 
this life it no longer bears fruit, and has 
nothing to give. Is it not a much better 
service of the glory of His mercy to an- 
nounce new triumphs, and to say to him : 
Thou savest ever; thou reignest over the 
living and the dead ; thy redemption retains 
all its value through immortality ; thy reign 
in heaven at the right hand of God contin- 
ues thy mission in this world ; thou inter- 
cedest always with equal power ; thou 

savest always wdth equal goodness ! 

O, my brethren, accept this magnificent 
hope ; to the triumphs of your divine Sav- 
iour there is still wanting, there lacks only, 
the abolition of hell. Do not restrict his 
reign, as he confined his mission, to the 
narrow limits of a mortal career ; make 
room in eternity, and give extension in 
heaven, to what is infinite, the love of Jesus, 
and if it is true that he has mounted to the 
right hand of his Father, if it is true that 
he shall reign until God has pat all his ene- 
mies beneath his feet, if it be true that there 



ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 



81 



is a Christianity of immortality as there is 
of life, recognize to each its efficacy ; among 
these enemies who are subjected, reckon 
beforehand, you who weep so bitterly the 
iniquities of some perhaps of your dearest 
relations, count these unfortunates, in the 
hope that they will receive in eternity the 
lessons that they have refused to follow in 
time. .... Yes, these thoughts alone are 
in harmony with the idea of infinite good- 
ness, and the expression of the Gospel 
which best confirms them is its definition 
of God : God is charity ! . . . . Brethren, 
this expression is the best explanation of 
life, death, and immortality ! 



6 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



AN EASTER SERMON. 



" Thomas, called Didymus, one of the twelve, was not with the dis- 
ciples when Jesus came ; they say to him then : We have seen the 
Lord. He replies : Except I shall see in his hands the print of the 
nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand 
into his side, I will not believe. Eight days after, the disciples being 
again assembled, Thomas found himself with them; Jesus came, 
though the doors were closed, and standing in the midst, he said unto 
them : Peace be with you ! He then said to Thomas : Reach hither thy 
finger, and behold my hands ; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it 
into my side, and be not faithless, but believing. Thomas said to him : 
My Lord and my God ! Jesus replied : Because thou hast seen me, 
thou hast believed ; blessed are they who have not seen, and yet 
have believed " — John xx. 24-29. 

My Brethren, — 

The extreme rapidity with which man 
passes from one sentiment to another is 
without contradiction one of the most re- 
markable traits of his nature. He can in 
an instant change in conduct and opinion 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 83 



as in destiny, and one is then astonished to 
discover in him the same man. 

The most opposite movements succeed 
each other instantaneously in his heart, and 
the vicissitudes of his life pass not so quick- 
ly as his emotions and thoughts. Consider 
Abraham and Jacob, at the moment when 
the one spares Isaac, and when the other 
recovers Joseph ; it is the same sentiment, 
it is paternal love, which fills the heart, and 
what a sudden revolution is operated in 
their fate ! Behold David condemning with 
justice the despoiler of the poor man's 
sheep, and hearing the terrible words : Thou 
art the man ! Behold Saul advancing with 
a firm step toward the persecutions which 
he promises to himself, and beaten down 
under the weight of this overwhelming 
question : Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou 
me ? It is always David, it is always Saul, 
and nevertheless how is the heart changed ! 
Their life is renewed, their soul subdued, by 
a power that they knew not the instant be- 
fore, and a destiny entirely new is opened 



84 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



to their regard. I could easily multiply 
these examples; everywhere you would see 
that in a day, in a moment, man may be- 
come in some sort different from himself ; 
and to come without delay to the subject 
which is to occupy us, what a distance sep- 
arates the disciple of Christ, saying : Ex- 
cepi 1 shall see in his hands the print of the 
nails, and put my finger into the print of the 
nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will 
not believe ; and the same disciple exclaim- 
ing before Jesus : My Lord and my God ! 

Brethren, it is good that man can thus 
change. Human life is so short, the propi- 
tious occasions pass so quickly and their re- 
turn is so* uncertain, the advantage of prof- 
iting by them without delay is so great, 
that it is good that man can thus change, 
can pass in an instant from vengeance to 
pity, from iniquity to virtue, from incredu- 
lity to faith, and thus possess himself of 
the beginnings of his regeneration. I do 
not mean to say that such prompt changes 
are without inconveniences; they have need 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



85 



of being confirmed by time ; they fatigue, 
they exhaust sometimes ; and when a wise 
and good resolution is taken, that is not all, 
it is to be fulfilled. Again, as these changes 
take place from evil to good, they may also 
occur from good to evil; a movement of 
pride, a transport of anger, an act of ven- 
geance, are often only the fruits of a first 
movement of which one immediately re- 
pents. Nevertheless, taken all together it 
is good that man can thus change ; it is a 
means the more of converting him, it is an 
added hope that he will convert himself; it 
is a wide door opened to all those who are 
neither wicked nor faithful, who float uncer- 
tain between their passions and their du- 
ties, and wait only an occasion to decide ; 
and to those who, without believing and 
without denying, yet doubt, hesitate in their 
uncertain opinions, and are ready at the first 
opportunity to become incredulous or be- 
lievers. Furthermore, these sudden changes 
accord with the vicissitudes of our terrestrial 
pilgrimage ; thus a Job passes in one day 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



from the highest prosperity to the most de- 
plorable misfortunes ; a Saul passes in a 
day from the persecutions that he inflicts 
to those that he suffers for the name of 
Jesus. You see, then, our life is in ac- 
cordance with our hearts; Providence and 
Grace often follow the same route, and 
without our being able to reckon whether 
there are more relapses or more amend- 
ments in this world, all this experience 
serves to confirm this grand precept, which 
is true for prosperity as well as for virtue : 
Let him who is erect take heed that he fall 
not! 

But whether one fall or raise himself, one 
of the most interesting studies that a Chris- 
tian can make, is that of the interval which 
separates the two extremes ; this interval, 
however short it may be, can always be 
measured. For a change so great there is 
required a great cause. Between David an 
adulterer and David repentant, there is the 
word of Nathan ; between Peter who de- 
nies with execrations and Peter who casts 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 87 



himself all in tears from the court of Caia- 
phas, there is the look of Christ ; between 
Saul persecutor and Saul persecuted, there 
is the magnificent vision of the road to Da- 
mascus. Let us see then to-day what there 
is between Thomas incredulous and Thom- 
as faithful. Let us endeavor to represent 
to ourselves this memorable scene. Let us 
endeavor to be present at the imposing mo- 
ment when Christ suddenly showed himself 
to his Apostles, and renewed the heart of 
the disciple who still doubted. You love 
too well the open tomb of your Divine Sav- 
iour to complain at being brought back to 
it, and perhaps the words of our lips and 
the meditations of our hearts may be ac- 
ceptable, if on this solemn day we can say 
to Jesus with as much confidence and grat- 
itude as Thomas : My Lord and my God ! 

I. It would be impossible to profit by the 
example that the account of the Gospel of- 
fers us, and to judge well of the sentiments 
of Thomas, under such striking circum- 



88 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



stances, unless we begin by knowing his 
character welL Whatever may be the cir- 
cumstances in which one finds himself, the 
impressions that one receives and the duties 
that one fulfils, or even the sins that one 
commits, the character never loses all its 
rights, and one remains faithful to it without 
being aware of it. Thomas, probably the 
only survivor of two t\yin brothers, is a man 
of frankness and uprightness, full of zeal 
and ardor, who holds to his first ideas as he 
obeys his first emotions. He is a man v^ho 
never hesitates, he devotes himself in the 
same way that he doubts, in the same way 
that he believes, in an instant and at once. 
When Jesus, who had crossed to the east- 
ward of the Jordan, announces the inten- 
tion of returning into Judea, to 1 Bethany, 
where the death of Lazarus called him, in 
spite of the dangers which awaited him in 
Jerusalem, Thomas, in a transport of love 
and admiration, exclaims, addressing him- 
self to the disciples; Let us go there also 
and die with him. And this same Thomas, 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 89 

who shows himself so ready to partake the 
danger of death with Christ and to follow 
him into the midst of persecutions, neverthe- 
less comprehended nothing of the mysteries 
of the cross or the oracles of the resurrec- 
tion. "When, in one of his last interviews, 
Jesus said to his disciples, Ye know ivhither 
I go and ye know the way, Thomas, as frank 
in his ignorance as we shall find him in his 
incredulity, interrupts Christ, and says to 
him : Lord, we know not whither thou goest, 
how can we know the way ? You see, 
Thomas is the same in his ignorance as in 
his devotedness ; he speaks with the same 
promptitude, expresses himself with the 
same frankness ; he is one of those men to 
whom one can trust, because their mouth 
speaks only from their heart, because they 
never say except what they think or what 
they feel, and because they say it at the in- 
stant. And notice that they act as they 
think, with ardor, with transport, as if car- 
ried away. Their precipitation, though no- 
ble and generous, is not without danger; 



90 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



for if they reach the goal when others seek 
it, they sometimes pass it when others have 
reached it. 

But, you will say to me, it is the charac- 
ter of St. Peter that I describe to you, and 
Christ had then two disciples who resem- 
bled each other Brethren, they were 

men like these that were required to spread 
the Gospel and found the Church, and this 
character of Thomas is not in truth with- 
out some relation to that of the son of 
Jonas. But Thomas has much less confi- 
dence in himself, and their characters pre- 
sent the same difference as their devoted- 
ness. Peter swears that he will die with 
Christ, and exalting himself above all oth- 
ers, he declares with pride, that even should 
all betray him, he would not do it. Thom- 
as does not swear; he exclaims. With one 
it is a movement of pride, with the other, a 
transport of fidelity. Thus one denied and 
lied, and the other doubted. "Without wish- 
ing to diminish the glory of the son of Jonas, 
the doubt was better than the denial; you 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



91 



will see also that the lesson given to Thom- 
as by Christ is very different from that 
which Peter received. It was necessary to 
reinstate Peter in the office of Apostle ; it 
sufficed to enlighten the spirit of Thomas, 
who had not fallen from his rank ; let us 
leave to each his faults, they have also 
each his glory and his virtues. 

It is for such characters that the least 
circumstances of life have an importance, 
because they draw from them results that 
colder men would not know how to bring 
out. Thomas, from what motive is un- 
known, was not at Jerusalem the day of 
the resurrection. It is certain at least, that 
in the evening of this memorable day, 
when Jesus showed himself to the Apostles, 
Thomas was not with the disciples. The 
language that Jesus addresses to him in the 
interview that we are studying attests suf- 
ficiently that Thomas had not seen him 
since the resurrection, and his absence leads 
naturally to the thought that he had left 
Jerusalem. From this circumstance, so 



92 THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



simple, all resulted. Perhaps had he wait- 
ed at least until the third day to depart, 
perhaps, in the morning, at the first rumor 
of the resurrection, ardent like St. Peter, he 
would have run like him to the sepulchre, 
and like St. John, he would have been able 
to say afterwards : I have seen and believed ! 
But his absence, of which certainly he him- 
self did not see the importance, became fa- 
tal to his faith, and served as a pretext and 
occasion for doubts. In the course of the 
week after the resurrection, perhaps even 
the Sunday following, Thomas returned to 
Jerusalem, saw the disciples, and their first 
care was to acquaint him with the great 
event which had filled them with joy. Rep- 
resent to yourselves the astonishment of 
Thomas at this unhoped-for news. Recall 
to your minds that no one had expected the 
resurrection of the Lord, neither the holy 
women, nor the friends of Christ, nor the 
disciples, nor the Apostles ; the oracles 
which announced the prodigy had not been 
understood, or rather had been forgotten 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



93 



amidst the horrors of Calvary, and if out- 
side of Jerusalem the report of it had 
reached Thomas, it is evident that he con- 
sidered it only as a popular rumor without 
foundation. He had quitted Jerusalem 
without expecting it, he returns not believ- 
ing in it; and the first word thjit is ad- 
dressed to him is the confirmation of this 
unexpected event! .... Then a conver- 
sation arose between Thomas and the ten 
Apostles, of which the Evangelist has evi- 
dently reported only the substance or the 
end. The discussion must have been ani- 
mated, because such is the nature of the 
human heart, because men do not talk 
coldly of a resurrection, because all the 
Apostles, incredulous or believing, could 
not but take the most ardent interest in the 
triumph of their cherished Master, because 
finally, it suffices that two men of an im- 
petuous character like Peter and Thomas, 
should disagree upon the truth of an occur- 
rence, and that one should affirm while the 
other contests it, for the temper of both to 



94 THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 

become roused, and that they should quit 
one another, each persevering in his ideas. 
Let us never fear, brethren, to see in the 
Apostles men like ourselves. Their work 
is so much the more beautiful, the tongues 
of flame which rested upon their foreheads 
are so much the more luminous for it, and 
the divine intervention in the establishment 
of Christianity so much the more evident. 
I advance nothing here which is not sup- 
ported by the Gospel. A simple reading 
of the account suffices to recognize that 
the sacred historian has given, I repeat it, 
only the summary of this interview, and he 
has chosen so well the few words that he 
reports, that we can judge the entire con- 
versation by them. 

What was the proof that the Apostles 
and disciples ceased not to give to Thomas ? 
One only: We have seen the Lord! and 
this style of discussion is conformable to 
the human heart. Witnesses who can say : 
We have seen, say nothing else, because 
this argument is the strongest that they 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



95 



can allege; they return to it unceasingly, 
they present it under a thousand aspects, 
they reproduce it under a thousand forms, 
and they are astonished that they do not 
convince, because they themselves are con- 
vinced. They have seen, and they do not 
believe themselves bound to advance other 
proofs. If that sufficed for them, why not 
for others? The self love of an eye-wit- 
ness is always engaged in his testimony, 
because one must doubt, in order to contra- 
dict it, either his sincerity or his reason. 
Thomas did not contradict his brother dis- 
ciples by accusing them of a falsehood; 
but the idea which seized upon him, the 
objection that he presented, the reply that 
he made, appear to have been always this : 
You have seen a spirit, and you believe you 
have seen the Lord. This error was con- 
formable to the prejudices of the Jews. St. 
Luke says in formal terms, that upon the 
first apparition of Christ the disciples, dis- 
mayed and troubled, believed they saw a 
spirit, and what shows completely that this 



96 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



idea was that of Thomas, is the proof that 
he demands. Regard it attentively : you will 
see that this proof is altogether material; 
they are wounds and scars - that Thomas 
wishes to see and touch, because he knows 
that a spirit has them not, and persisting in 
this error, he ends by saying to the Apos- 
tles : Except I shall see in his hands the print 
of the nails, and put my finger into the print 
of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, 
I icill not believe. 

These, brethren, are the famous words to 
which Thomas owes the title of incredu- 
lous, and which seem filled with the most 
indiscrete exaction, and deep-rooted incre- 
dulity. No, that is not the sense which 
must be given to them. These w r ords did 
not form a connected discourse; they are 
animated assertions, sudden replies which 
have burst out one after the other in the 
warmth of the dispute : it is the obstinacy 
of a man who reasons, and not that of an 
unbeliever who contradicts ; it is the intem- 
perance of tongue of a disputant who is 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



97 



attacked on all sides at once ; it is persever- 
ance in a single idea, and not the uncon- 
querable incredulity which refuses to see, 
i and asks for reasons only to combat them. 
And the proof that Thomas, if I may so say, 
did not speak seriously, is that he did not 
for an instant dream of doing what he said; 
that he did not touch these wounds ; that 
he finished by believing, precisely for the 
reason that he rejected, for the same reason 
as the rest of the disciples, simply because 
he saw the Lord. But then, if these words 
do not deserve all the reproaches with which 
history pursues and vulgar reputation sur- 
rounds them, if they are only words w r hich 
escaped in the heat of the argument, why 
has St. John reported them ? From a very 
simple motive : It is that Jesus repeated 
the same expressions that the disciple had 
used, and that we should not have compre- 
hended the reprimand of the Lord, if we 
had not known the imprudence of the dis- 
ciple. Brethren, I feel constrained to say: 
Would to Heaven that all unbelievers were 
7 



98 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



as Thomas! His doubts come from the 
head, the heart has nothing to do with it; 
for myself, I shall never fear such doubts ; 
faith is easy when the heart is sincere and 
good. 

No conclusion unfavorable to Thomas 
can be drawn from the fact that the day 
when this conversation took place is un- 
known ; if it occurred in the course of the 
week which followed the resurrection, con- 
cord continued to reign between the dis- 
ciples, because the succeeding Sunday we 
find Thomas again with them ; if it took 
place this same Sunday, Thomas had no 
time to persist in his error. It was in the 
same house where, eight days previous, 
Jesus had shown himself in the mid«t of 
them. The hatred of the Jews was far 
from being calmed, the same precautions 
were necessary ^ the doors were carefully 
closed ; suddenly they open .... Breth- 
ren, faith should never draw back before a 
miracle ; the power which performs one 
can perform a thousand, and if there was a 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



99 



prodigy here, why should we hesitate to 
acknowledge it? Such is not the meaning 
of the account, and we ought not to change 
into a useless marvel a natural event. The 
doors were closed, suddenly they open for 
Christ; he presents himself in the midst of 
the apostles, and says to them : Peace be 
with you ! Thomas was among them ! . . . . 
What thoughts must have immediately 
arisen in his soul ! What surprise, what 
apprehension, what joy! How must his 
heart have burned within him, when his 
regard encountered, for the first time, that 
of Jesus resuscitated ! What will he do 
now? It is for him to remain true to his 
own thoughts ; it is for him to remember 
that he demanded to see; for him to ac- 
knowledge that he does see. What will he 
do ? . . . . Thomas remains silent. He 
must wait, he must leave it to Jesus to 
speak, and, without opening his mouth, 
with a fixed, immovable eye, he looks on, 
whilst a thousand different emotions throng 
his heart; he regrets having persisted in 



100 THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 

his error ; he regrets that he did not place 
faith upon the testimony of his brethren; 
and, at the same time, covered with con- 
fusion, seized with astonishment, transport- 
ed with joy, he stands there before the Lord 

as before his judge Peace be with you ! 

No, peace could not yet be with the incred- 
ulous disciple. And then it is towards him 
that Christ advances; it is he whom he 
seeks, it is he whom he names ; it is to 
him that he addresses himself, and says : 
Reach hither thy finger and behold my hands ; 
and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into 
my side, and be not faithless, but believing'. 
What gentleness, what goodness, in this 
censure of the doubt, in this recall to faith ! 
And at these accents so well known, at 
these marks of pain, and above all, at these 
words, the same that Thomas had pro- 
nounced in his error, and that Christ alone 
could know without having heard them; 
the disciple passes in an instant to the most 
profound conviction, and equally prompt in 
his faith as in devotion and his doubt, can 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 101 

only utter a cry of admiration, of gratitude, 
and of love: My Lord and my God ! What 
a reply, my brethren ; what an admirable 
and simple confession of faith ! Acknowl- 
edge that he who believed in this way, 
could not have been incredulous in a very 
culpable manner. With what earnestness 
he believes ; how he throws himself wholly 
towards his Divine Master, who comes to 
him; how he abjures his vain error, and 
now what is there in the world which can 
shake his confidence? Nothing. It is to 
Christ alone that Thomas was able to say : 
My Lord and my God ! and these words he 
will repeat during the whole course of his 
apostleship, from country to country, and 
from island to island, even to the coasts of 
the Indies, if the Lord sends him there. 

II. The scene that I have just retraced 
for you, offers all the characters of grandeur 
and simplicity that one loves to recur to in 
the Gospel. Christ resuscitated, shows him- 
self there with his accustomed glory and 
charity, and it is impossible not to be moved 



102 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



in representing him to one's self, when he 
deigns to address to the disciple these touch- 
ing words : Be not faithless, but believing. 
One doubt remains to be cleared up : on 
this memorable evening when Jesus came 
to show himself to his disciple, and thus to 
fill his heart with a lively and positive faith, 
did he think only of Thomas ? It remains 
for me to prove to you, that at this moment 
Jesus thought of all those who in the course 
of time must be added to the Church in 
order to obtain salvation. 

An apostle has said : We walk by faith, 
and not by sight. Brethren, how true and 
profound are these words ! You who be- 
lieve in God and Christ, you who consider 
the Gospel as the sole rule of your opin- 
ions, your hopes, your duties, look around 
you ; contemplate the world, life, religion, 
Providence: of all that you believe, you 
see nothing. Tell me what there is to 
be seen in the Church of Christ; tell me 
what are the visible things which can oc- 
cupy your faith O vanity! A little 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 103 



water for the foreheads of our children, 
once in their infancy ; a little bread, a little 
wine for ourselves ; that is all that we see. 
Is that then Christianity ? No. Christiani- 
ty is invisible, like the God who made it. 
Christianity is within us, and not without: 
the human heart : behold its only domain 
and we walk by faith, not by sight 

Pursue this idea into its details, and you 
will recognize how simple and easy it is. 
You expect, you desire, sanctification ; for 
you know that without sanctification no one 
will see the Lord, and that we are com- 
manded to be perfect as our Father ivho is 
in heaven is perfect. You are impatient to 
be freed from the fatal faculty that we have 
of sinning ; you are anxious that all ter- 
restrial turpitude should be effaced from our 
hearts, and that all our passions should be 
changed into a pure and virtuous energy ; 
you seek sanctification, and what you see 
above all else around and in you is sinful- 
ness. Where is this holiness that you de- 
sire? You have never seen it, you never 



104 THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 

will see it on the earth ; for we are all un- 
profitable servants^ and on a thousand arti- 
cles we could not reply to a single one. 

Again, you await impatiently a condi- 
tion happier than this life ; a state in which 
your peace will not be so often troubled ; 
one without disquietude, without suffering, 
without poverty, without injustice; you ex- 
pect perfect felicity, and you see around 
you only misery and trouble ; in vain you 
look through this world ; an ever pure hap- 
piness does not exist here ; we know it so 
well that we no longer seek it here ; every- 
where there are some leaves dried and 
faded on the most flourishing and beauti- 
ful tree. 

Finally, you desire, you impatiently await, 
immortality, and you see around you only 
tombs. Immortal beings as we are, we all 
have borne, bear now, or shall bear, sorrow ; 
and the sorrow is seen, but the immortality 
is not seen. And in vain you who weep 
over the grave, in vain you who, like Mary, 
seat yourselves at the door of the sepulchre, 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 105 



in vain do you essay to pierce the shades 
of death ; in vain through your tears do 
you attempt to catch a glimpse of immor- 
tality. No, you see only the dust, a shroud, 
and the worms ; all the rest is concealed. 
Brethren, with so many examples, you 
must acknowledge that sanctification, 
beatitude, immortality, admirable objects 
for our efforts, holy promises of the Lord, 
celestial certainties of our future, all are 
invisible. We walk by faith, and not by 
sight. To believe, is to represent the truth 
to one's self, and not to see it. 

"We walk by faith ; and a thousand gen- 
erations before us, and all those who shall 
pass upon this earth after us shall do the 
same. We walk by faith, and not by sight; 
and behold a disciple, an apostle, Thomas, 
one of the most ardent and zealous, who 
cries : If I do not see and touch, I will not 

believe Do you conceive now all the 

danger of this example ? If it were neces- 
sary to see in order to believe, who then 
would believe? How many Christians 



106 THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 

would there have been in this world, and 
how long a time would the Church have 
endured ? There would have been a single 
generation of believers, and the Church 
would have ended at the ascension of Jesus 
Christ. 

What, then, did Jesus do in order to ad- 
just everything, to reconcile the interest of 
a disciple whom he did not wish to abandon 
in his error, with the interest of so many 
believers who lived their life either before 
or after the Gospel, and who could not see 
Jesus on the earth ? O my brethren ! Jesus 
anticipated the Apostle ; he accorded to him 
the proof that he demanded ; he made the 
disciple look upon him ; he showed to him 
the wounds of the nails of the cross ; he 
forced out from his heart these words of con- 
secration and faith : My Lord and my God! 
and in order that no one should imagine 
that he had any reason to regret this privi- 
lege, and the right to say : When I see I 
shall believe, Jesus said to Thomas: Be- 
cause thou hast seen me> thou hast believed; 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 107 

blessed are they who have not seen, and yet 
have believed ! that is to say : their faith is 
better still than thine, and their recompense 
will be better than thy recompense. What 
wisdom and equity in these words ! What 
a just division established between the con- 
temporaries of Jesus on the one part, and 
on the other, the believers who preceded him 
upon the earth, and we who come after 
him! What justice is this, which weighs 
thus the faith of the entire world in its 
balance, forgets not to place in the line of 
the account the difficulties or facilities that 
one finds in believing, measures the success 
by the efforts it costs, and approves in pro- 
portion to what it has been necessary to do 
in order to be approved. 

See, then, how senseless are the regrets 
and murmurs that one sometimes hears in 
regard to the eighteen centuries elapsed 
since the Gospel. We have come too late 
into the world, say these imprudent Chris- 
tians, and if we had seen Jesus Christ, we 
should know him better. Ah ! how many 



10S 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 



of these rash men would then have seen 
only the son of Mary ; how many perhaps 
would have taken him for a Samaritan, an 
impostor, a rebel ; how many the day after 
the resurrection would have said : If I do 
not see the wounds of the crucified, I will 
not believe ; and Christ would have replied 
to them as to Thomas : Blessed are they 
who have not seen, and yet have believed! 
This one expression reestablishes the equi- 
librium between the contemporaries of 
Christ, and ourselves and all the generations 
of the earth ; this one phrase recognizes to 
each his rights, assigns to each his hopes ; 
it proves that salvation is universal, and 
that no one is forgotten in the mercies of 

the Lord Patriarchs and prophets, 

illustrious examples of the world, you who 
believed yourselves to be only strangers and 
sojourners upon the earth, you who hailed 
from afar the day of the Lord, trembling for 
joy, blessed are you, for you have not seen, 
and you have believed ! . . . . People of all 
places, generations of all ages, to you also 



THE FAITH OF THOMAS. 109 



salvation is offered, and your faith may at- 
tend without uneasiness the moment to be 
changed to sight. Let us adore, O my 
brethren ! these boundless mercies where 
we have each our part. Let us be per- 
suaded that our faith is as acceptable to 
the Lord as that of all his children. Let 
us be persuaded, that, for grace as for Provi- 
dence, one day is as a thousand years, and a 
thousand years as one day ; let us not look 
behind, but advance towards the end which 
is proposed to us ; let us keep the faith in 
a pure conscience, and walking with a firm 
step amidst that which is but show, con- 
tent with the assurances which are given 
to us ; we shall prefer to these marks of the 
cross, to these signs of suffering and death, 
even to the open tomb near which the re- 
membrances of this day reunite all believ- 
ers, the glorious vision of Stephen, who 
saw the heavens opened, and the Son of 
man at the right hand of God ; and from 
the depths of our hearts will arise this 
unanimous adoration : My Lord and my 
God! 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 



A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 

" The angel said to the shepherds : Behold, I bring you good tidings 
of great joy, which shall be for all people. " — Luke ii. 10. 

My Brethren, — 

In the great events of revelation, in the 
extraordinary days when God shows all 
his divine goodness to human eyes, and 
raises one of the corners of the veil which 
conceals his providence, there are always 
to be considered the fact in itself, and the 
circumstances which accompany it; the in- 
tention of God, and the means which serve 
to reveal and accomplish it. 

Study the various details of time and 
place ; understand how a miracle is per- 
formed, as much as the performance of a 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. Ill 

divine prodigy can be comprehended ; listen 
to each word, remark each gesture, follow 
each look of the envoy of God who speaks 
as a master to nature ; observe well what 
wind blows across the desert, when one of 
the gulfs of the Red Sea parts its waters, 
and gives passage to an entire people ; throw 
aside the dry leaves and withered twigs of 
the accursed fig-tree ; reckon the harvests of 
the fruits and their seasons in Judea : but 
in these minute researches, you have made 
studies in history rather than religion ; you 
have consulted nature much more than 
providence ; you have demanded of the 
East the secrets of those .times, not of 
heaven its mysteries ; and what remains 
to you to examine, is the depths of things, 
the connection of events, the end for which 
God wished thus to rule the course of na- 
ture and the order of the world, to speak to 
us otherwise than as he speaks every day, 
and to add the voice of a miracle to the 
constant voice of the heavens which re- 
counts his glory. Whilst you regard only 



112 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

4 

the paraphernalia, the exterior, the acces- 
sory, you resemble the proselytes of ancient 
worships, who stopped on the threshold or 
in the porch, and you know nothing of the 
mysteries and solemnities of the interior of 
the sanctuary. 

To these thoughts you will perhaps op- 
pose the customary objection : Is it for us 
to sound the ways of God, to fathom his 
intentions, to know wherefore he has done 
so many things ? Is it for us to pretend to 
look into these depths,*and penetrate so far 
into these mysterious marvels. To these 
doubts, my brethren, I reply boldly, Yes, it 
is for us ! Go.d never performed a prodigy, 
sent a plague, accorded or refused an ex- 
traordinary favor, opened a tomb, or caused 
a sudden splendor to shine in the heavens, 
except to instruct us. How are we in- 
structed, if we pay attention only to the sign, 
and not to what it signifies ? How are we 
instructed, if, when God causes a voice to 
resound in the air, we listen only to the 
sound, harmonious or terrible, and without 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 113 

knowing what words it pronounces, what 
thoughts it expresses ? We are then simple 
spectators of the works of the mighty Lord ; 
we regard them as vain pomps ; we listen to 
them as sterile melodies ; we are no longer 
disciples whom the Master deigns to teach, 
a people that he enlightens, a flock that he 
leads ; and the more striking are the won- 
ders by means of which God instructs us, 
the more we risk being dazzled, and the 
greater the danger that the substance may 
disappear under the forms. At the epoch of 
Moses, if the whole attention is fixed on the 
ten plagues, on the great lesson that heaven 
gives to a tyrant, on this obedient sea which 
suspends its waves, on Sinai that for days 
was surrounded with so much glory, on this 
desert, finally, which required forty years 
to devour a whole generation, whilst entire 
caravans perish there in a day ; one forgets, 
distracted by these phenomena, the profound 
intention of God, in hindering the Hebrew 
people from confounding itself with the 
Egyptian people ; one forgets, at the foot of 
8 



114 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 



burning Sinai, the ten commandments, to 
which all this display was to give author- 
ity ; one forgets, during the forty years of 
the pilgrimage, whilst this generation was 
slowly dying far from Canaan ; one forgets 
the great motive, that it was not sufficiently 
strong and faithful, to make the conquest 
of, and fix itself there. Consider atten- 
tively the age of Moses, Egypt, Canaan, 
the necessity of constituting the people as 
a depository of the true religion ; then the 
end appears worthy of the means ; Moses 
is in his place in the ancient covenant, 
and the age explains the prophet. 

Transport yourself into the covenant 
of grace, and nothing of this relation is 
changed. There, everywhere, from the 
fields of Bethlehem, where stood the man- 
ger, to the hills of Bethany, where the as- 
cension took place, everywhere prodigies ; 
but everywhere these prodigies have an end 
and a meaning, teach or guarantee some 
truth, and never resemble those useless 
flames which shine for a moment in the 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 115 

heavens, which seem to be stars, and are 
not. My brethren, I have dwelt long and 
forcibly on these principles, because I wish 
that to-day your thoughts should follow 
this direction. Our ceremonies of this day 
represent to us the first wonders of Chris- 
tianity, — but I do not come to speak to 
you of those shepherds of Bethlehem, who 
have rendered their humble and sincere 
testimony to the fidelity of the oracles, and 
the beginning of the Gospel, and have gone 
the way of all the earth, without even leav- 
ing a name behind ; nor of those angels 
who brought to the world the first tidings 
that the year of the good-will of the Eternal 
had arrived ; those angels have returned to 
the heavens, their voices have resumed si- 
lence, and our relations with these spirits 
of light are finished, or rather suspended, 
until they recommence in Eternity. Fi- 
nally, I shall not attempt to carry you into 
the stable and to the manger; we have 
sufficiently sure guaranties of the generous 
humility of the Saviour, and by these 



116 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 



words so energetic, He was similar to us 
in all tilings but sin. we know enough of it. 
Let us rather see what was here the 
thought of God ; the announcement of the 
angels reveals it to us clearly ; it is that 
Christianity is a great joy, and a great joy 
which belongs to vMywhich shall be for all 
people. Behold the idea which the angels 
wished to give to the world of the new 
covenant, from its first day. And this trait 
raises a great question : Has Christianity 
changed ; Christianity, is it still recogniza- 
ble by this same sign ? is Christianity to- 
day what it was at its origin ? is it still 
and for all a great joy ? Grave and im- 
posing discussion, which for all Christians 
is of equal interest, and, if we succeed in 
resolving it, this study will, I hope, enable 
your piety to render to the manger of the 
Saviour the justice which is due to it. 

I. Often, my brethren, the things of re- 
ligion fill us with emotion, and strike us 
with astonishment, even before we have 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 117 

had time to examine them ; and who can 
refrain, unless a deplorable lukewarmness 
has cooled his soul ; unless habit has, with 
its icy hand, enervated his moral forces ; 
who can refrain from being surprised and 
affected, in seeing that the new covenant 
announces itself as a great joy ? That is 
its first sign, its first word, its first charac- 
ter ; from the commencement, it attracts, it 
charms, it consoles the unfortunate race 
descended from a sinner ; the new altars 
that it will cause to rise in this valley of 
tears w 7 ill be surrounded with contentment 
and peace ; its temples will be asylums ; its 
houses of prayer, houses of refuge against 
the ills of the world ; its rites will be tran- 
quil festivals ; its adorations will be frater- 
nal rejoicings ; felicity will inhabit its sanc- 
tuaries ; whoever issues from them sad, will 
do wrong, and will have a right to charge 
his sadness only to himself; for the new 
covenant is a great joy ! You see, I do 
not penetrate this fertile thought deeply ; I 
take it in its simplicity ; I seize in their 



118 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 



rapid passage the first ideas to which it 
gives birth ; I endeavor, in a few words, to 
throw into your souls the first emotions 
that it excites ; and already, without the 
least effort, we reach the hopes of a reign 
of peace, the doctrines of a religion of love. 
And this is not an ecstacy of fanaticism, a 
revery of superstition, a folly of credulity ; 
it is not the rash promise of a terrestrial 
reformer, promising much more than he can 
perform ; a voice of the earth, saying im- 
prudently : Peace ! peace ! ivhere there will 
be no peace ! . . . . It is a voice of Heaven, 
which deceives not; it is a communication 
on the part of God ; an announcement 
brought by angels. My brethren, a simple 
and confiding faith willingly believes the 
angels when they speak of joy; they ought 
to be conversant with it; it is made for 
them ; it is their element, their property, 
their life, and they cannot have wished to 
deceive the world, in announcing to it as a 
great joy what would have been only de- 
ception and sadness. 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 119 



What a profound difference this first ex- 
pression establishes, from the first moment, 
between the new religion and all the pagan 
worships, all the earthly systems which then 
divided humanity ! Where were there then 
religions which were to their worshippers a 
great joy? My brethren, there were none! 
Some were a great terror, and reigned 
through fear over an enslaved people ; 
others were a great impurity, and intoxi- 
cated the people with sensual pleasures, hav- 
ing no better paradise to promise ; all were 
a great deceit, and reigned over men's souls 
only by abusing the credulity of the vulgar 
or by the political interests of the day. And 
one may say also, that all were a great ruin ; 
for, before the Gospel, Paganism fell to 
pieces on all sides, and none knew how to 
reconstruct or replace it ; the religion even 
of Moses, descended to petty superstitions, 
and divided into fanatical sects, was no 
longer more than the shade of itself; sad 
therefore, and without force or beauty, like 
every institution which has degenerated, 



120 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

and inclines towards its fall. But behold 
the worship which takes its place ; behold 
the Church ready to succeed the Temple, 
the new covenant and the second law ; be- 
hold the first day when God reveals him- 
self on a new Sinai; no more flames or 
thunders ; no more menaces of death ; no 
more barriers that none dare overpass ; the 
religion that God establishes for ever, and 
which shall endure when the heavens and 
the earth shall pass away, is proclaimed from 
its dawn as a great joy ! O, how sweet it 
is to hear God himself speak thus to the 
earth! how sweet to know that joy and 
holiness may always walk together, that 
the Creation and the Redemption are in 
accord, and that God has most certainly 
created us only to render us happy, since 
the only divine religion, that which alone 
is true, universal, and imperishable, called 
itself at its origin a great joy ! 

II. If you penetrate profoundly into 
Christianity, you find in it everywhere a 
pure and holy joy, settled and firm, that 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 121 

nothing can take away from true Chris- 
tians ; and the more you penetrate the 
spirit of the Gospel, the more you find of 
it. Consider man under the triple relation 
of his dignity, his destiny, and his future j 
you will see that for the believer there is 
no greater joy than Christianity. 

His dignity ! before the Gospel, man had 
forgotten it, and by that forgetfulness he 
had lost it ; he knew no longer what he 
was ; he was ignorant of his rank in Crea- 
tion, and by that ignorance had descended 
from it. 

I wish to cite only one proof among a 
thousand, — slavery. Before Christianity, 
the world was divided into masters and 
slaves ; man was everywhere the proprietor 
of man ; and slavery was not only an abuse, 
a misfortune, a remnant of centuries of ig- 
norance and barbarism, that one labored, as 
at the present day, to remedy with prudence 
and extirpate slowly. No ; servitude was 
considered as a principle and a right; as a 
just, natural, and necessary institution ; it 



122 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

was a rule, not an exception ; and this 
frightful evil extended to no less a degree 
than to divide the human race into two 
classes ; on one side a few tyrants, gorged 
with gold, luxury, and blood ; on the other, 
the crowd of slaves, men fallen below the 
brute beasts ; for the brutes defend their 
life when one seeks to take it, but the gla- 
diators in passing before the emperor, said to 
him : " In order to amuse thee a moment, 
we are going to die, and we salute thee." 
O degradation of being created in the im- 
age of God ! O fatal forgetfulness of all 
dignity, which led to the oblivion of all vir- 
tue! To what an excess of misery would 
the world have reached without the Gospel! 
But Christ came, and man with a great joy 
delayed not to learn that man belongs only 
to himself and to God ; that no one has the 
right to say to his neighbor : " Thou art 
mine ! " that, in the eyes of God who made 
us, there reigns a perfect equality between 
us all ; that one man is as worthy as another 
before him ; by these principles, the Chris- 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 123 

tian, re-established in his own esteem, re- 
stored to his just rank, has resumed his dig- 
nity of man, the guaranty of his social dig- 
nity ; and the master and slave, praying to 
the same God, blessing the same Saviour, 
have been naturally led to say to one an- 
other, the slave to the master : " I belong 
to thee according to human laws, but in 
reality I belong to myself"; and the mas- 
ter to the servant : " Thou art my neighbor 
and my brother ! " Christians! in time, these 
words will be pronounced everywhere. 

It is also through Christianity that con- 
science has recovered its moral liberty ; it 
is by Christianity that man has been placed 
in a condition to say : I believe according 
to what I understand ; I act according to 
what I believe. No earthly authority has 
preserved the right to give orders to the 
conscience of others, to search it, and de- 
mand of it an account. 

More than ever man has recognized him- 
self as responsible, but responsible only to 
God ; and it is only in falsifying Christian- 



124 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

ity that he has forgotten it, and has kneeled 
at the feet of a priest to confess sin and 
elicit pardon ; to whom belongs the fault, 
if man has changed into great sadness the 
great subject of joy ; the principle remains 
intact ; between God and each of us there 
is no one except only Christ. Behold by 
these two traits what the Gospel has done 
to restore man to the sentiment of his dig- 
nity, to break his chains, to re-establish his 
honors, to dissipate his prejudices, to recall 
to him that he bears in himself the image 
of the Creator, to recall to him that he is 
the king of the world, to remind him, final- 
ly, that his conscience is as inviolable as 
his liberty. 

To this civil liberty, which carries with it 
neither license nor rebellion ; to this moral 
liberty, more precious still, and which is 
very far from favoring the forgetfulness of 
duties, it is necessary to add, a s the last 
liberty that Christianity has given to us, 
religious liberty ; and I do not speak now 
of the imprescriptible right, which every 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 125 

-assembly has, to constitute itself a church, 
and to say, I will worship in this place 
after this manner and on such days : pro- 
vided that the doors of the new sanctuary 
remain open, and that one can hear what 
is said and see what is done there, where 
is the power which has the right to pro- 
scribe and overthrow it? But there is more 
in Christianity, and I speak to you of the 
liberty of worship which is expressed in this 
fundamental sentence of our own, God is 
a Spirit ! They who ivorship him must wor- 
ship him in spirit and in truth. To worship 
in spirit, that is possible everywhere and 
always ; there are no longer sacred times 
or places, indispensable rites or obligatory 
confessions ; our altar is everywhere with 
us ; a new tabernacle of our pilgrimage, it 
follows us into the encampments of our 
desert, and we raise it or fold it at will. 
You wish to worship, and you lack a tem- 
ple : well, worship in spirit, and the earth 
that your feet touch is holy then, the heav- 
ens are your temple, and the air your in- 



126 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

cense. You would celebrate the commu- 
nion, and, far from all churches, you have 
neither table, cup, nor bread : communicate 
in spirit, and your union with Christ is 
equally intimate, and you are your own 
pastor, and have celebrated the holy supper 
within yourself. Thus, through Christianity 
man is free in society, free in his conscience, 
free in his religion, and recognizes as his 
master, only God ! My brethren, the angels 
were right : Christianity is a great joy. 

III. In a misery without consolation, 
man rtms the risk of losing the sentiment 
of his own dignity, and if Christianity is 
on this point conformable to our nature, it 
must also be careful of our interests, atten- 
tive to the wants of our souls. Consider 
now our destiny ; Christianity has given to 
us our true joy, our true peace, our true 

death Our joy: it has taught us 

where it lies, it has shown in what it con- 
sists, it has made us seek it where it is to 
be found ; not noisy, empty, transient, still 
less impure and sensual ; but calm and 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 127 

fixed, fertile in holy progress, precious fruits, 
and good thoughts. As to the wants of 
life, Christianity has inspired us with a 
confidence that no other worship inspires, 
that no other book than its own teaches, 
the confidence that God knows of ivhat we 
have need, even before we ask him ; that to 
each day suffices Us troubles, and that the 
morrow will take care of itself; that thus 
we have bread enough when we have it for 
a day, and that, as God is eternal, it is suf- 
ficient to ask of him the daily bread. As 
to felicity even, Christianity has encom- 
passed with all its power the family circle ; 
blesses the joys of the domestic fireside ; it 
sanctifies the ties of conjugal love, filial 
piety, paternal tenderness ; and teaches to 
those who take pleasure in them how one 
acquires by it that great gain almost un- 
known before the Gospel, contentment of 
spirit, which of all our contentments is the 
best. Christianity undoubtedly could not 
remove all the ills of this world, and re-es- 
tablish for us the garden of Eden ; but it 



128 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

relieves and softens them all ; it has a balm 
for each wound of the heart, and to all 
afflictions it opposes the peace of God, 
that peace which surpasses all understand- 
ing, which is offered to all, and which is 
stronger than our adversity, stronger than 
poverty, calumny, grief, than death itself. 
Death! . . . . O my brethren! let me repeat 
to you the terms already employed. Chris- 
tianity has given to us our true death. It 
has taught us to die. Before Christ, death 
was a scene of display managed beforehand, 
an act of indifference, a moment of despair, 
an effort of courage, and rare, very rare, in 
antiquity are the examples of an end calm, 
serene, modest, happy; those that are cited 
are the triumphs of some few sages; at the 
present day, such deaths are the duty, the 
right, the aim of every Christian, and who- 
ever would die tranquilly in Christ, has only 
really to desire it ; all the faithful may be- 
come Stephens, and Jesus never absents 
himself from us when we ask of him at our 
supreme hour to receive our spirits into his 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 129 

hands. What could Christianity do more 
to render our destiny peaceable and prosper- 
ous ? It provides for everything, for our 
life and our death, and on his bed of grief 
and agony, ready to breathe out his last 
sigh, a true believer recognizes that, for a 
dying man above all, Christianity is a 
great joy. 

IV. Would it be such, however, if its 
influence extended no further, if its joy died 
with us, if it disappeared in our dust, if we 
did not carry it into our immense future? 
Though not exposed to the persecutions 
which menaced the first Christians, our joy 
would be short and melancholy, and we 
should be the most miserable of men, if we 
had no hope in Christ except for this life. 
How would the feeling of our dignity serve 
us when it became necessary to die, without 
a reliance upon a resurrection in grace and 
glory ? Of what use would be the liberty 
of our conscience, when it should be neces- 
sary to appear for judgment, and on a thou- 
sand counts we could not reply to a single 
9 



130 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

one ? And how would our griefs be re- 
doubled, our happiness made empty, our 
affections even rendered sombre and griev- 
ous, if there were no salvation *fo hope for, 
both for ourselves and for those whom we 
love! Grace be for ever rendered to the 
Lord ! His covenant is a great joy, be- 
cause it is a covenant, and He ivills that all 
men should be saved, because He has recon- 
ciled us with himself in Christ, and we are 
thus no longer unfortunate children, sepa- 
rated from the love of the Father, and justly 
disinherited from the treasures of his glory ; 
but repentant children, who have returned 
to say to him in the name of Jesus, u Un- 
worthy to be called thy children, place us 
in the ranks of thy hired servants," and 
we have obtained much more than we 
should have dared to ask ; we have ob- 
tained admission into the Paternal man- 
sion, the pardon of all our transgressions, a 
salvation which insures to us an eternal 
victory over evil, and eternal salvation filled 
only with peace, glory, love, and holiness ; 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 131 

the heavens, for us also, will resound with 
the joy fulness which is greater for the sin- 
ner who repents than for the just who have 
no need of repentance ; and when our 
turn to appear there shall come, it will be 
said to us : Behold, they who are dead 
are returned to life ! behold, those who are 
lost are found again ! Thus, then, O my 
brethren! even beyond the sepulchre, be- 
yond the judgment, even in heaven and 
through all the ages of eternity, the cove- 
nant of grace is and will be a great joy. 

You see there is nothing wanting to the 
great joy of Christianity. It extends itself 
to all, and suffices for all; one may see 
that without it man has nothing, and with 
it he lacks nothing. To whom does this 
joy belong; who has the right to aspire to 
it, who has the means surely to obtain his 
portion of it? The angels did not leave 
the first witnesses in doubt in regard to 
this great interest, and, in fact, it was ne- 
cessary that from the first moment this 
question should be decided; without such 



132 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

decision, men thenceforward would have 
began in their pride to say to each other, I 
am one of the elect, one of the redeemed of 
this Saviour : thou art not ; and from that 
moment the joy of the good news of the 
salvation would have been lost in the 
midst of these unjust pretensions and hate- 
ful disputes. No, no; the celestial mes- 
sengers who proclaimed the nativity, de- 
clared for whom the Saviour came in terms 
so simple, so clear, so strong, that it is as- 
tonishing that any one has ever dared to 
forget. This great joy, they said, shall be 

for all people For all people 1 What 

language could better announce the uni- 
versality of the Gospel ? Do you find 
there the shadow even of an exception, or 
the slightest pretext for insinuating one 
into the mercies of grace? For all people ! 
and it is in truth this word, the people, — 
of an energy so well known, — that one 
reads in the text itself of the message of 
the angels. Consider a momojit this celes- 
tial communication, as the shepherds of 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 133 

Bethlehem considered it. This idea, Be- 
hold a joy which shall be for all people, was 
immense, extraordinary, unheard of for a 
Jew of that age ; never had such a word 
resounded in the ears of the poor and hum- 
ble herdsmen of Judea ! What! the heav- 
ens open above their heads : the shades of 
this night last not until dawn ; a resplen- 
dent brightness shines in the fields ; celes- 
tial personages appear, speak; they an- 
nounce a great joy, and for whom ? For 
the Scribes only and the Doctors of the Law, 
seated in the chair of Moses, from whence 
they explain according to their wisdom the 
commandments of God, weigh them in the 
balance, and declare ivhich is the greatest ? 
. . . . For whom ? For the Pharisees, whom 
the multitude encompass with so much 
respect, and who serve God with prayers 
so long, such severe fasts and attentive ob- 
servances ? Or for the Sadducees, equally 
honored in the synagogues and the palaces, 
admitted to speak so closely in the ear of 
the great and of kings ? . , . . For whom ? 



134 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

For the holy successors of the families of 
Levi and Aaron, who assist before the 
altar, enter into the holy places and burn 
the sacred incense ? . . . * For whom again ? 
For the glorious and mighty Herod, this 
magnificent king who exhausts his treas- 
ures to repair and embellish the Temple ? 
.... For whom still ? . . . . But what would 
it serve to prolong this list of the grandeurs 
of these times? . No, no! this joy is not 
alone for the doctors of the people, the 
priests of the temple, the princes of the 
time, the happy of the earth ; it is for them 
if they wish it, and they will receive their 
part of it ; but it is also for the simplest of 
their disciples, the humblest of their clients, 
the most obscure of their subjects, the poor- 
est of their fellow-citizens, — it is for all 
people; whoever will advance his hand, 
shall draw it back again full of these new 
treasures ; the superb doctor shall not carry 
away more of it, under his flowing robe, 
that he flaunts in the public squares, than 
the unknown herdsman under the leathern 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 135 

girdle which confines his coarse garments; 
and in vain the ostentatious Herod expends 
during ten years immense sums to recon- 
struct and decorate the Temple ; the day 
is not far off when at the gate of this same 
portico the mite of the widow will be 
worth all these treasures ; the sun of justice 
refuses its rays to no one. This great joy 
is for all people. 

Is this still so? This joy, which runs 
back to eighteen centuries and more, is 
it still for all people ? or rather, universal 
at its origin, has it changed, has it sadly 
narrowed, — to whom does it now belong ? 
You see I return to the first question that I 
raised : Is Christianity still for all a great 
joy ? Your faith, no doubt, has not fallen 
into the grievous error of believing, that 
among men some are lost, whatever they 
may do not to lose themselves, and others 
saved, God charging upon himself, so to 
speak, to sanctify them, without their tak- 
ing any care about it ; you believe St. Paul, 
when he declares to Timotheus that God 



136 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

wills that all men should be saved ; you do 
not think that God makes distinction of 
persons, and puts an invincible difference 
between man and man ; you do not think 
that there are privileges in Christianity, and 
that the judgment of God varies, while he 
has declared that he will judge each ac- 
cording to his works; and when you de- 
mand of nature or revelation, when you 
interrogate yourselves, or when, if I may 
dare so to speak, you interrogate God, 
everywhere you discover proofs which dem- 
onstrate, everywhere you receive replies 
which attest, these two magnificent and 
simple truths, that always and everywhere 
man is man, and always and for all Chris- 
tianity is Christianity. Under these rela- 
tions, resemblances profound and unalter- 
able exist between us all. Resemblance 
of creation: Have we not all one Father? 
said a prophet ; God made of one blood all 
the human race, said an apostle. Resem- 
blance of sin : He ivho says he has no sin, 
lies, and the truth is not in him. Resem- 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 137 

blance of misfortune : Man born of woman 
is of short life and full of trouble. Resem- 
blance of death : By one man death came 
into the world, and came upon all men, be- 
cause all have sinned. And of worship : 
According to St. Paul, there is but one 
Lord, one baptism, one faith. And of tomb : 
All are dust, and all shall return to dust. 
Finally, of immortality : Since the spirit 
returns to God who gave it. .... And when 
all things thus are similar between us, shall 
not salvation be so also ? 'Alike feeble, 
alike sinners, alike mortal, should we not be 
alike saved ? Exposed to . the same ship- 
wreck, should we not land at the same 
haven ? Clothed w 7 ith the same sorrows, 
should we not nourish the hope of the 
same reunions ? Reassure yourselves, serv- 
ants of Jesus ; this great joy is for all peo- 
ple ; and one of the last words of Christ to 
the founders of the Church was : Announce 
the Gospel to every living creature. O, 
let us guard ourselves, then, from ever fall- 
ing into the deplorable inconsistency of 



138 CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 

these fanatics, who open to all one hell 
without opening to all one heaven ! Let 
us not put Moses in opposition to Jesus ; 
and if we believe Moses, who speaks of 
one creation, one fall, one death, let us also 
believe Jesus, who has promised us, that 
whoever ivill call upon the name of the Lord 
shall be saved, and who speaks only of one 
redemption and one immortality. 

Yes, this great joy is for all people. Hu- 
miliate yourselves, then, before it, you the 
wise, the rich, the powerful of the earth ; 
recognize, in blessing God, that here all 
your privileges are abolished, and descend 
first to the simple rank of man in order to 
rise to the rank 1 of the redeemed of Jesus 
Christ. Yes, this great joy is for all people. 
Rejoice, then, all you the humble, the sim- 
ple, the poor of the earth ; behold a good 
which is common to you ; behold a treas- 
ure whence you can draw as largely as any 
one ; and the sad inequalities of which you 
bear the weight, in religion exist no longer. 
Yes, this great joy is for all people, and this 



CHRISTIANITY A GREAT JOY. 139 

principle is the true foundation of the liberty 
and equality of men. Outside of this tem- 
ple we will render honor to whom honor is 
due ; within it we are all of the same rank, 
and we will render honor only to Christ 
and to God. May it then be for ever cele- 
brated from age to age the day on which 
this joy commenced ! May it be celebrated 
until the epoch when the joy that it recalls 
shall be consummated in immortality ! 
This epoch will come, when there shall no 
longer be but one Shepherd and one flock on 
the earth. This eternity will come, when 
there shall no longer be but one commu- 
nion of saints'! 



ST. PAUL, THE THIRTEENTH 
APOSTLE. 



11 The Lord said unto Ananias : This man is a chosen vessel unto 
me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children 
of Israel. For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my 
name's sake." — Acts ix. 15, 16. 

My Brethren, — - 

Whether we regard Christ, in the first 
year of his ministry, when he began the 
great work of the salvation of the world, 
when he began those astonishing journey- 
ings so well summed up in this short ex- 
pression, He went from place to place doing 
good; whether we regard him at the mo- 
ment of a departure for Galilee or passing 
through the streets of Capernaum, saying 
to Philip or to Matthew, " Follow thou 
me ! " and that after a conversation which 
enlightens their intelligence, sanctifies their 



ST. PAUL. 



141 



souls, and opens their minds to the light of 
faith, this Galilean and this tax-gatherer 
quit all and become apostles, .... or re- 
gard him honoring, with an imposing and 
simple eulogy, a good man named Nathan- 
iel, declare that there is no guile in him, 
recognize him for a true Israelite, show 
him that he read in his heart and discov- 
ered his thoughts from afar, obtain this re- 
ply to it : Master, thou art the Son of God, 
thou art the King of Israel, and thus make 
of him an apostle ; . . . . finally, if on the 
Lake of Genesareth, so often the theatre of 
his prodigies, we see Christ mingling with 
simple fishermen who prepare their barque 
or throw their nets, go on board their vessel, 
withdraw with them to some paces from 
the shore, thence instruct the attentive mul- 
titude, afterward grant them a miraculous 
haul of fishes, and calming their sudden 
terror, say to them with authority : Come, 
follow me ; I ivill make you fishers of living 
men, and thus associate with himself in his 
work a disciple like Peter and a friend like 



142 



ST. PAUL. 



John Brethren, these are undoubtedly 

scenes worthy of the Gospel, commence- 
ments worthy of an apostleship, marvels 
worthy of Christ. Everything here breathes 
that easy mingling of simplicity and gran- 
deur, of familiarity and glory, which makes 
of the evangelical history a page apart in 
the annals of our world, a series of events 
such as the world had never seen, such as 
it never will see again. Nevertheless, these 
scenes are terrestrial, and leave us on the 
earth : heaven takes a part in them, but 
tranquilly and from a distance ; we are sur- 
prised and moved rather than amazed, and 
the journey of Philip, the fig-tree of Nathan- 
iel, the nets and barques of the sons of Jonas 
and Zebedee, seem to be there to recall to 
us that the heroes of this sacred history are 
men like ourselves, that their Lake of Tibe- 
rias resembled the current of our rivers and 
the shores of our seas, and that Christ then 
descended to man in order the better to 
succeed in raising him afterwards to him- 
self. In a word, the distance which sepa- 



ST. PAUL. 



143 



rates us from the confidants and compan- 
ions of Jesus seems to us less when we 
contemplate the terrestrial side of their his- 
tory ; it is easier to represent it to ourselves 
and to put ourselves for a moment in their 
place. At eighteen centuries' distance, the 
preparations for a journey or the anecdotes 
of an interview, some boats moored to the 
shore and nets drying in the sun, appear 
like details of little interest, amidst the im- 
mense results of Christianity, the triumphs 
of the Gospel, and the empire of the world 
promised to its truths. But reflection soon 
teaches that the humblest traits of this re- 
cital have their importance, that nothing is 
useless in the Gospel, that all have served 
to the excellent end of the mission of Christ, 
and that all these little things put together 
have made one great one, — the redemp- 
tion of the world and the establishment of 
the Church. 

Behold the manner in which Jesus made 
apostles and chose his co-workers, whilst 
he lived our life, whilst he walked with a 



144 



ST. PAUL. 



human step on the dust of this earth. After 
his departure from this world, the Lord 
wished to associate with them a new fel- 
low-disciple ; and what astonishing and 
profound differences, from the first aspect, 
discover themselves between the calling of 
the first apostles and that of St. Paul! 
One may say here, that everything is dif- 
ferent. It is no longer a poor fisherman, 
an obscure publican, a Galilean without 
instruction, without credit, without glory, 
who must slowly and by a long and docile 
intimacy with the Saviour, become by de- 
grees worthy to second him; it is a man of 
science, a man of genius, a wise man of the 
world, a disputant of the age, a Hebrew 
born of Hebrews, a friend of the high-priest 
and a confidant of the Sanhedrim, who is 
about to change his part and become a friend 
of Christ. It is no longer a master, poor, hum- 
ble, unknown, a man of sorrows, the reject- 
ed of all nations, believed to be the son of 
an artisan of Nazareth, accepting the favors 
of friendship, forewarning that the foxes 



ST. PAUL. 145 

have their holes and the birds of the air 
their nests^ but that he had not a place to 
lay his head ; forewarning those who love 
him of the death which awaits him ; — it is 
the Lord, arrayed in glory, girt with majes- 
ty, opening the heavens in order to appear ; 
and speaking from the height, no longer 
from the heaven of Judea, beyond which 
until then his power had not been manifest- 
ed, but from the heaven of the Syria of 
Damascus, as if to show clearly that the 
entire world belongs to him. Thus, noth- 
ing of the humble accessories of the first 
avocations, the tax-table, fishing imple- 
ments, none such appear here; — it is not 
only a scene of the earth ; it is a unique 
spectacle, where terrestrial and celestial 
things touch and mingle; it is an event 
one half of which passes on the earth and 
the other in the heavens. To crown all, 
the moral miracle, if one may so speak, is 
still more marvellous than the phenomena 
of nature which accompany it. Paul is not 
a disciple of the Baptist, already enlight- 
10 



146 



ST. PAUL. 



ened by his lessons and prepared by his 
warnings, a Nathaniel in whom there is no 
guile, a Philip or a Matthew so zealous to 
follow Jesus, an Andrew so eager to lead 
his brother to him, a just man like St. 
Peter, or loving like St. John, whom it is in 
question to raise to the rank of Apostle ; 
— Paul is an enemy of the Gospel, a perse- 
cutor of the new-born Church, the ravisher 
who entered by force into the houses of 
Jerusalem and carried off the believers to 
throw them into prison, an accomplice of 
the rage of Caiaphas, a witness of the 
death of Stephen, .... it is he who is about 
to become a chosen instrument to bear the 
word of Christ to the Gentiles, the kings, and 
the children of Israel; it is he, who, as 
persecutor, marches to Damascus, still in- 
flamed with menaces and slaughter, and 
who enters there an Apostle of Jesus Christ. 

My intention is to consider with you to- 
day the purpose of this destination, unique 
among all those of men, and endeavor to 
resolve this grave question : Wherefore, 



ST. PAUL. 



147 



after the ascension, was an additional 
Apostle given tb the Church? 

I. "When one has read the Gospel to the 
end, and meditated the last instructions 
that Christ leaves to his disciples, it seems 
as if everything was accomplished for the 
salvation of the world, all prepared for the 
foundation of the Church, and when pur- 
suing this study one comes to the first 
events which followed the ascension of the 
Lord, to the gatherings and the prayers of 
the Apostles, to their tranquil waiting for 
the promised Comforter ; then to the out- 
pouring of the Holy Ghost, to the mag- 
nificent emblem of the tongues of flame 
alighting on their foreheads, to the care 
that Providence took to invest these pub- 
licans and sinners with the faculties and 
powers necessary to the success of their 
work; finally, when one follows the tri- 
umphs of the new-born Christianity, it 
seems as if all were complete, that there 
were enough Apostles, that the Jameses, the 



148 



ST. PAUL. 



Peters, the Johns, would suffice after their 
last consecration for this immense task, 
that the way was open, and nothing re- 
mained but to walk therein. It seems as 
if a new apostle was useless, and could do 
nothing more. In a word, he who reads 
the Gospel for the first time does not at all 
expect to see St. Paul appear there. At 
the commencement of the Book of Acts one 
reads the first preachings of Christianity, 
the first wonders performed by St. Peter, 
the first persecutions suffered by the faith- 
ful, the admirable and touching picture of 
the death of Stephen, and, concealed, so to 
speak, in one corner of the picture, obscure- 
ly associated with so slight a circumstance 
as the complaisant guardian of the clothes 
of the martyr's executioners, is read a name 
until then unknown, — the name of a young 
man named Saul Who would be- 
lieve, judging from the ordinary probabil- 
ities of life, from the usual habits of his- 
torical eloquence, — who would believe 
that this name would recur so often in 



ST. PAUL. 



149 



the course of the history, to the extent of 
occupying it entirely at the end? who 
would believe that this young man, so ob- 
scure that one hardly sees him amidst the 
details of a crime and the blood of an exev— 
cution, would develop so as to occupy the 
principal place in the picture ? who would 
believe that this tranquil spectator of a 
martyrdom would soon envy the death and 
the palm of his victim ? who would believe 
that this Saul would be St. Paul, the Apos- 
tle of the Gentiles ? 

This astonishment has led astray those 
who have suffered themselves to be de- 
ceived by appearances, and to attempt to 
dissipate an empty chimera is not to com- 
bat it. The improbability has caused the 
truth to be suspected. Because it is sur- 
prising that Paul should be there, men 
have not wished to believe that he was 
there ; and there even exists a long work, 
which pretends to be Christian, which has 
for its title these insolent and significant 
words, Jesus, but not Paul, and for its aim. 



150 



ST. PAUL. 



to show that the whole history and writ- 
ings of this Apostle offer only a mass of 
falsehoods engrafted upon Christianity, like 
a parasitical branch upon a tree whose sub- 
stance it exhausts. My brethren, as there is 
no error which has not entered the human 
mind, and found disputants to spread it 
and ignorant people to believe it, we 
should no more be astonished at this ab- 
surdity than at so many others equally 
worthy. Nevertheless, this example suf- 
fices to show that one never knows before- 
hand where incredulity, in its subtlety, may 
seek arms against us, and that one cannot 
have too many always ready against it. 
Faith knows, so far as it is permitted and 
possible to fathom a divine decree, why the 
founding of Christianity was not left to the 
care of the twelve Apostles to whom it was 
confided ; why, afterward, St. Paul was 
charged with it, with them. 

A sincere and simple piety would reply 
simply, that God wished it, that his will 
suffices to justify his will, that he is master 



ST. PAUL. 



151 



to choose his ministers to his satisfaction, 
to augment the number of them one day 
and diminish it another; and that, if the 
human mind is astonished at this so far as 
to become incredulous, it is because it has 
forgotten, that from the stones of the streets 
God can cause to rise up children to Abra- 
ham and ministers to Christ. This reply is 
sufficient to reassure faith, but not to dissi- 
pate doubt and satisfy him who sees in it 
too great improbability to believe it. This 
reponse supposes faith ; it is necessary to 
find one which produces it. 

A stronger and more just reply is, to say 
of the Apostle what was said of the archi- 
tect entombed in the magnificent temple 
which he had built, To know him, look 
around you ! "We can say of Sti Paul, To 
know him and believe in his ministry, re- 
gard what he has done ; read his life, writ- 
ten by a friend who now separated from 
and now again rejoined him, and see if 
those are the tales of liars who agree to- 
gether, during a man's whole life, to lie. 



152 



ST. PAUL. 



Read, above all, the Epistles, of which it 
has been said that they alone proved Chris- 
tianity, — those Epistles, an inexhaustible 
treasure of beauty, consolation, and doc- 
trine, — Epistles addressed in some sort to 
the entire world, and which are nevertheless 
so personal, a work of genius which attests 
a great man, a monument of truth which 
attests a divine Apostle. Compare them 
with the Book of Acts, and find between 
these letters and the history a contradiction 
if you can ; we shall find there a thousand 
proofs of accordance, which could not have 
been prepared beforehand nor arranged 
after. Certainly, my brethren, what has 
been said of the narratives of the Gospel 
may be said of the life and writings of St. 
Paul. It is not thus that one invents, and 
for myself, before believing that so much 
genius has been made subservient only to 
falsehood, I must have pointed out to me 
another imposter like him ; but St. Paul is 
unique in history, and up to the present 
time the world has not seen a second. 



ST. PAUL. 



153 



Nevertheless, though these considerations 
prove satisfactorily that this Apostle was 
worthy of the apostleship and capable of 
fulfilling this immense and holy task ; still 
this is no proof that it was necessary to 
confide it to him, and that dawning Chris- 
tianity could not do without him ; it is 
necessary, then, to penetrate still farther 
into the question, and fathom the motives 
which determined the choice of St. Paul 
after the first Apostles, — a choice so much 
the more extraordinary, since, perhaps too 
young, or what is more probable, absent 
from Judea, he had never seen Christ dur- 
ing his mission on earth, and only saw him 
later in his glory. 

II. In his glory ! . . . . This idea is the 
first which explains the calling of St. Paul. 
It was well that one calling of an Apostle 
should be made by Jesus from the midst of 
his glory and the height of the heavens. 
The others had been humble, human, ter- 
restrial, so that it became necessary that 
they should be afterwards sanctified and 



154 



ST. PAUL. 



ratified on the Day of Pentecost; behold 
here one to whom from the first moment 
nothing is wanting; behold one who will 
have no need that the fires of heaven shall 
lend their wonders, and a tongue of flame 
descend and alight on human foreheads; 
the baptism of fire is found in the light- 
ning which overthrows the presecutor. It 
showed by the fact, that Jesus, re-entered 
into heaven, had not separated himself from 
his Church, that he watched over all its 
interests, that his eyes were upon it far 
from Judea as in Judea; it proved by the 
act, that Jesus saying : Saul, Saul, why per- 
secutest thou me ? was the same Jesus who 
had said to the fishermen of Bethsaida : I 
will make you fishers of living men! It 
was to unite by the act, the mission of 
Christ in this world with his reign in the 
heavens, and was a new proof accorded that 
Jesus had truly ascended to his Father, who 
is our Father, to his God, who is our God. 
Thus with what force, at Jerusalem before 
the people, at Csesarea before Agrippa, 



ST. PAUL. 



155 



and twice in his First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, does St. Paul pride himself upon 
having seen Christ in his glory ! In almost 
all his Epistles, from that to the Romans, to 
his letters to Timothy, he rests upon the 
positive fact of having been chosen, called, 
set apart from his mother's womb, by the 
will, by the command of God, for the work 
of the apostleship. Undoubtedly, it was 
upon this ground that he claimed the con- 
fidence of the believers ; but is it not ad- 
mirable that he should have received from 
heaven directly, the same authority accord- 
ed until then at Capernaum before the 
table of a publican, and at Bethsaida be- 
fore the nets of a fisherman ? 

And yet, there was much less to be done 
to change a publican or an artisan into an 
Apostle, than to change to an Apostle an 
adversary of the name of Christ such as he. 
To call St. Paul was not alone to choose a 
new propagator of the Gospel; it was to 
confound an unbeliever, humiliate arro- 
gance, conquer an enemy, overthrow a per- 



156 



ST. PAUL. 



secutor; it was making a friend of an an- 
tagonist, a witness of an adversary ; it was 
to employ thenceforward in the service of 
truth, him who until then had served only 
error. What an immense victory in this sin- 
gle one. Who might not be converted, if the 
pupil of Gamaliel, the trusty friend of Cai- 
aphas, the minister of the rage and fury of 
the Sanhedrim, could be converted ? How 
many unbelievers will be confounded be- 
cause such a one has been ! How many 
believers confirmed in their faith ! how 
many feeble ones strengthened! how many 
faithless shaken! how many of the dispu- 
tants of the age reduced to silence ! And in 
fact, a host of texts, the accounts of the 
Acts, the commencement of the Epistle to 
the Galatians, written whilst all these rec- 
ollections were still so fresh in the mind of 
St. Paul, attest the salutary and profound 
impression produced in the Church by this 
celebrated conversion ! I was unknoipn by 
face, says he, to the churches of Christ in 
Judea; they had only heard it said, That he 



ST. PAUL. 



157 



who heretofore persecuted us, now announces 
the faith that he previously destroyed, and 
they glorified God because of me. They 
were right! Yes, St. Peter extending hos- 
pitality to the convert of Damascus, for fif- 
teen days on his return from Arabia, St. 
James giving the hand of fellowship to the 
executioner of Stephen, offer one of the sur- 
est proofs that God holds the hearts of men 
in his hand, and that his word is truth. 

III. The equal of the other Apostles in 
sincerity of heart, in strength of conviction, 
in virtue, their equal also in divine inspira- 
tion, St. Paul is their superior in science, in 
eloquence, in talents, in everything which 
gives human glory. No man, in any time, 
in any country, has shown more force, more 
grandeur of soul. No man has shown to a 
greater extent the union> so rare, of a fine 
genius and fine character, and all these 
wonderful faculties God in his wisdom 
wished to place at the service of the Chris* 
tian religion. Let us not pause to remem- 
ber that the severe and delicate taste of the 



15S 



ST. PAUL. 



Corinthians preferred the eloquence of Bar- 
nabas to his ; still less will we deign to pay 
attention to the reproach that his style is 
not so pure as that of St. Luke. St. Paul 
was all that one could be in his time, even 
a Roman citizen ; he knew all that one 
could know in his age, as Moses previously 
in his ; he was a Jew, and the pupil of one 
of the most celebrated doctors of Judea ; he 
graduated in the schools of Tarsus, then one 
of the centres of pagan philosophy and lit- 
erature ; Jews and Pagans, he could combat 
with their arms all the enemies of the Gos- 
pel, and make use of their language to con- 
found them. He was great through genius : 
that the man who spoke before the Areopa- 
gus of Athens, the tribunal of Felix and Fes- 
tus, and the throne of Agrippa, who reasoned 
in the Epistles to the Galatians and Ro- 
mans, should be the same who wrote the 
praise of charity, the effusions of the Epistle 
to the Philippians, the adieus of the Epistle 
to Timothy, and the same who wrote the 
gracious recommendation to Philemon in 



ST. PAUL. 



159 



favor of the slave Onesimus, is without 
contradiction a marvel of the human spirit, 
a proof which shows how subtile and flex- 
ible it is. He was great by character : no 
one has better than he persevered to the 
end; he is the Apostle always, everywhere, 
without relaxation, without rest, without 
fear; he is the Apostle in all that he says, 
in all that he does, in all that he suffers ; 
Apostle before those whom he loves as be- 
fore those whom he despises, for he does 
not hate; Apostle by the side of Timothy 
as in the presence of Nero ; and at the end 
of this life he dies a martyr Ac- 
knowledge, here is the man who was want- 
ing to carry Christianity beyond Judea far 
into the world, to reconcile in the eyes of 
nations the law of Moses and the new 
law, to speak with equal authority to Jews 
and heathens, to scribes and philosophers, 
to thunder in the first synod of Jerusalem 
against the mixture of law and Gospel, and 
convert it to his opinion, and to convert also 
Sergius, the governor of Cyprus, Denis, a 



160 



ST. PAUL. 



judge of the Areopagus, and who beside ? — 
Onesimus, a slave flying from his master. 
To the immense variety that idolatrous 
Europe then presented the immense genius 
of St. Paul responded. He made himself 
all things to all men; and that is precisely 
what is most difficult to do in this world 
and to succeed in it; three things were re- 
quired, w T hich no one united as he did, — 
his character, his genius, and finally his in- 
spiration. 

IV. His inspiration! Brethren, let us 
pause upon this expression. The object of 
the Apostleship of St. Paul seems to me to 
have been to give to the world and to the 
Hebrews a great lesson, of which at that 
time especially there was great need. At 
that time man had reached the end of his 
wisdom ; he had come to say, like Pilate, 
What is truth ? and when he had said that, 
he thought all had been said, and found 
nothing more to say. The source was ex- 
hausted, the water flowed no longer, and 
left the slime exposed. What was then 



* 



ST. PAUL. 161 

the Roman empire ? A compact mass of 
cruelty and sensuality, divided between 
tyrants and slaves. And what was Israel? 
. . . . Israel was no longer! There remained 
in the place of the noble descendants of 
Abraham only a crowd of hypocrites, who 
attentively washed their hands and arms 
before a repast, while awaiting the Messiah, 
who had already come and departed. And 
what was the rest of the world? Dark- 
ness and barbarism. What was requisite, 
then, to show to the world, in order that it 
should direct its attention to Christianity ? 
It was necessary to show to it that genius 
alone, with the most admirable gifts, talent 
with the most extensive knowledge, virtue 
even, and force of character, and grandeur 
of soul, could serve it but little, and could 
not extricate it from the terrible condition 
to which it was reduced. And, if I may 
venture so to express myself, there was not 
a day, not a moment, to lose ; for the world 
was then in despair at its moral, religious, 
and even social aspect; all the monuments, 

11 



162 



ST. PAUL. 



all the recollections of the epoch, prove it 
sufficiently; the world stood still in despair, 
not knowing where to go; humanity was 
as if it had lost its road, and knew not of 
whom to demand it. As to morality, the 
noblest minds, had for a resource only the 
morality of the Stoics, which taught that 
one should harden himself in the unequal 
struggle of man against misfortune, but did 
not teach the sounding the depth of the 
wound in order to extract its poison ; the 
greatest men of this school had given the 
most admirable and useless examples: they 
displayed magnificent virtues, sublime ef- 
forts of some chosen souls, virtues that the 
mass did not believe made for its use, teach- 
ing how to die much more than to live, and 
it is of this last lesson that they had need 
above all. As to religion, all the gods began 
to have their temples in Rome, and by aug- 
menting the number, by procuring the means 
of comparing all these gods, men came to 
know them better, that is to say, they vili- 
fied them more ; the multiplicity of the apo- 



ST. PAUL. 



163 



theosises diminished the splendor of them, 
and the more the number of divinities was 
augmented, the more the number of wor- 
shippers was diminished. As to the social 
order, Tiberius preluded Nero to lower the 
degradation of the world to a Caligula and 
a Heliogabalus. The patricians found it 
quite natural to imprison their debtors in 
caverns until hunger made them pay, and 
to throw their slaves for food to the fish in 
their fish-ponds ; but, on the other hand, they 
found it natural also to be the compliant 
courtiers or the victims of a despot ready 
to burn Rome for his momentary amuse- 
ment. Thus, the resource that men em- 
braced with the greatest ardor was the 
melancholy gayety of which the literature 
of the time presents the faithful expression, 
— that gayety which dreams ever of the 
tomb, hopes for no morrow, counts only on 
the passing day and the cup crowned with 
roses, which it empties with long draughts, 
and which awaits thus until its last smile 
expires on our lips, at the instant when 
death comes to freeze them. 



164 



ST. PAUL. 



Now, then, behold a Jew, named Saul or 
Paul, as you please ; this Jew is a great man 
in the full force of the term, in all the beauty 
of the title, and this man, we know not 
what he would have become if he had 
been a heathen ; but he was a Jew, and 
we know what he became while he was 
left to himself, — he became a cruel persecu- 
tor, the aider and abettor of the executioners 
of a just man; behold the kind of service 
which he rendered to unfortunate and mis- 
guided humanity. "What a terrible proof 
of the powerlessness of genius ! . . . . But 
sanctified by faith, enlightened from above, 
guided by an inspiration, this man becomes 
like a city upon a mountain^ vMch cannot be 
hidden ; this man displays to the world how 
he can arouse and raise himself, find true 
contentment of spirit, true quietude of heart, 
liberty and truth, the sentiment of duty, 
which was but a blotted line in the book 
of human life, hope on this side of death, 
and a blessed immortality beyond. At the 
epoch of the history of humanity, when men 



ST. PAUL. 



165 



believed the least, — when they believed in 
nothing, neither in progress, happiness, nor 
heaven, — at the epoch when all the.polished 
nations had lost their ancient convictions, 
and did not imagine it possible to find 
another faith, — he brings the light of Chris- 
tianity from the depths of Judea into the 
heart of Italy, and becomes the greatest 
benefactor of humanity. What an admir- 
able proof that faith in Christ could alone 
recall the human race into the right way, 
and open for all a new era of peace and 
liberty, of domestic and social happiness, 
of holiness and virtue ! Yes, the wounds 
of this world were so great, that God alone 
could close them. Paul, in spite of all his 
genius, aggravates them while he goes 
alone; he labors to heal them, from the 
moment that God goes with him. 

V. If his example shows that the work 
of Christ could not be done by a simple 
man, it shows also that this man, in order 
to convert and save others, must have begun 
by converting and saving himself. Physi- 



166 



ST. PAUL. 



cian, heal thyself, is the just cry of the human 
race to him who proposes health to it ; and 
so long as the thick and heavy beam injures 
your own eye, vainly will you extend the 
hand to remove the mote which obscures and 

wearies mine My brethren, to continue 

to the end this beautiful and simple image, 
the beam was in the eye of Saul, hardened, 
terrible, even bloody. How did it fall? 
Who removed it from that eye, so worthy 
to behold the pure light, and which afterward 
saw it so well, contemplated it so fixedly, — 
contemplated it as the eagle in the heavens 
regards the sun ? You already know ; the 
hand of God himself raised the veil which 
hindered him from seeing the truth, and he 
recognized it immediately ; he cherished it, 
he embraced it, he forgot it not, he never 
betrayed it, he died for it, he found grace 
and glory at the same time; the enemy of 
Christ became his envoy, his friend, his 
martyr; he loved much, because much had 
been forgiven to him, and he who at the 
gate of Jerusalem was seated on the ensan- 



ST. PAUL. 



167 



guined dust, guarding the clothes of the 
executioners of Stephen, is now of the num- 
ber of those who are at the right hand of 
Jesus, seated upon thrones judging the twelve 
tribes of Israel. "What a change from error 
to truth, from hardness of heart to grace, 
from shame to glory! "What an exchange 
of a death in despair against a death in 
peace, of a resurrection to damnation against 
a resurrection to reward, and of an eternity 
near to Jesus against an eternity elsewhere ! 
And when one thinks that the entire Gos- 
pel is only an offer of pardon for sins, that 
salvation is pardon to the sinner and the 
way of progress reopened for all, that the 
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus aimed 
only, for this world and for the other, 
at this reconciliation of holiness ; brethren, 
what a sure guaranty and what a pro- 
found dispensation is it, that the greatest of 
the Apostles, the most illustrious founder of 
Christianity, should be himself a converted 
unbeliever and a pardoned* sinner, a friend 
for a time faithless and reconciled with 



168 



ST. PAUL. 



Jesus, who is also our friend ; a son for a 
time prodigal, and received by the celestial 
Father, who is also our Father ! For whom, 
then, will salvation in this new religion 
which commences be impossible, since it 
pardons its most cruel persecutor ; for whom 
will faith be impossible, since it enlightens 
him ; for whom sanctification, since it sanc- 
tifies him, and what sins may not be atoned 
for, since his are ? Where may not the 
cross of Jesus extend as a sign of grace, 
since it covers those peaceful houses which 
he desolated with his fury, the mournful 
prisons which he filled with victims, the 
place of suffering where he tranquilly seated 
himself, the road to Damascus, by which he 

went to persecute still But no ! there 

he stops ! Saul, Saul is no more Behold 

Paul, who shall announce pardon in Christ 
to the Gentiles and to kings, and who will 
be himself the living proof that Christ par- 
dons. Hear himself upon this great subject, 
and acknowledge that the secret of his call- 
ing is above all in these words of his epistle : 



ST. PAUL. 169 



Mercy has been granted to me, in order that 
Jesus Christ might show, in me the first, all 
clemency, to serve as an example to them who 
shall believe in him to obtain eternal life. 
In him the first! Ah, no doubt it is true! 
he, the first enemy of Christ, was the first 
pardoned ; he was pardoned by him whom 
he had offended even to blasphemy, and 
whom he persecuted even to murder; he 
was pardoned by him to whom he had as 
yet offered no other sacrifice than the blood 
of Stephen. According to his own words, 
then, let this example of clemency serve as 
a lesson to all of you who believe in Christ 
in order to have eternal life. Hope all ; hope 
that this same clemency will extend itself 
over you, without the opening of the heav- 
ens, the flash of the lightning, the bursting 
of the thunderbolt, the voice from the clouds 
sounding in the depths of your heart, and 
demanding of you wherefore you persecute 
Christ, were it only in forgetting him. You 
cannot count upon these appeals from the 
midst of glory, these flames, these wonders ; 



170 



ST. PAUL. 



but you may all expect a similar pardon. 
Consider, then, St. Paul as the measure of 
the clemency of the Lord. You whom the 
remembrance of your sins torments, who 
know not how to appease its bitterness, nor 
where to find peace again, think on St. 
Paul, and see where he found his : he was 
pardoned. You whom the imperfection of 
your repentance disquiets, who would ar- 
dently repent more fully, who know not 
how better to repair your faults, consider 
St. Paul, and let his example give you the 
courage which you lack ; and you, finally, 
whom the justice and holiness of God in- 
timidate, whose piety dissolves in terrors, 
and who ask of yourselves unceasingly : 
Where shall I fly far from his face, and who 
am I that I should approach God ? . . . . Fly 
not; you are sinners whom God pardons as 
he pardoned Paul before. My brethren, let 
these thoughts inspire you, not with the 
fatal security which lulls to sleep, saying 
pardon will come sooner or later, but with 
the soft and salutary hope which says to 



ST. PAUL. 



171 



God : There is pardon with thee that thou 
mayestbe feared, and guarding this thought 
in om souls to the end, firmly persuaded, 
even to the tomb, that Christ died for our 
offences, we shall see beyond that he rose 
from the dead for our eternal justification. 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 



"Godliness has the promise of the life that now is 5 and of that which 
is to come." — 1 Timothy iv. 8. 

My Brethren, — * 

What vast and sublime promises are 
made to piety in these simple and impos- 
ing words ! The present life and that which 
is to come ! How many things in these few 
words, and what an immense and rich per- 
spective they open to the imagination, to 
the intelligence, and above all, to faith ! 
The present life, that is to say, the whole 
interval comprised between the cradle and 
the grave, and all which fills for us this un- 
certain interval, all that Providence throws 
into it of joy and sadness, of trials and 
duty ; the present life, that is to say, our 
temple, our family, and our country, all the 
gentle and pure affections which fill our 



THE TWO PREMISES TO PIETY. 173 

hearts, and the griefs that we have to sup- 
port, the dismal tears that we have to shed. 
That is certainly much ; if piety prevails 
over all these things, its efficacy is great, 
and I know of no influence which out- 
weighs it. Nevertheless, piety would lose 
its value and beauty, our hearts would re- 
volt against its insufficiency, if its influence 
were*no longer than this life, if it expired, 
so to say, with us, if it stopped at the tomb 
and lost itself in the dust ; it would become 
useless to us, like a too short stream of pure 
water disappearing in a sterile sand. But 
to the promises of the present life it joins 
those of the life to come. Weigh well this 
expression, so vast in its sublime clearness : 
The life to come ! That is to say, the life 
which shall not end; all the depths of eter- 
nity, and all that eternity reserves for us of 
progress, science, happiness, holiness, and 
love. Behold the domain of piety ; it em- 
braces, thenj our entire existence, and sub- 
jects it to itself completely ; not alone this 
existence, so uncertain, rapid, imperfect, and 



174 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

often filled with privations and sadness, 
which is given to us in this world ; but the 
better existence which is reserved for us for 
a different world. It is necessary, in order 
to fulfil this double aim, and to serve these 
two ends, it is necessary that the piety of 
which the Apostle speaks in the text should 
be able to assume two characters, — agree 
with the world and with heaven, be at once 
terrestrial and celestial ; simple, easy, con- 
ciliating, as is requisite for time ; elevated, 
sublime, pure, as is requisite for eternity. 
Faith, adoration, love, prayer, all these 
things cannot have in the future life the 
same characters as in the actual; we are 
only men, feeble, imperfect, fallen ; we are 
not angels nourished in glory, nor faithful 
servants already sanctified for ever ; and 
you do not think that you will believe, 
that you will pray, that you will love in eter- 
nity as you do now. Piety, such as the 
text defines it, ought then to know how to 
adapt itself to the wants of the earth, and 
prepare itself for the glories of eternity. 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 175 

Finally, in order to fulfil the two conditions 
which the text imposes upon it, piety, 
though an inhabitant, so to say, of the earth, 
should come to us from Heaven ; it ought 
to be celestial in its origin ; without that it 
would exhaust itself in this life, it would 
die with us, it would end for each one at 
the brink of the sepulchre, and you know 
that it does not terminate there : it has 
the promises of the life to come. 

These principles have an irresistible evi- 
dence, and it is beyond these first ideas that 
the difficulties commence ; piety, it is true, 
has the promises both of the world and of 
heaven ; but what piety, it will be said ? 
Behold the inevitable question at which one 
arrives in spite of one's self, and amidst the 
diversity of worship, of sect, and of faith, 
how is one to know how he stands ; where 
to throw the anchor? What bottom will 
be firm enough to hold it, tossed as it always 
is between the contrary waves of life and 
death ? And among so many different kinds 
of piety, of which one can it be said that 



176 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

the promises belong to it? Look around 
you in the society and the Christianity of 
to-day! Those who have preserved the 
worship that our fathers reformed are pious 
and numerous; those Christians, who, to- 
wards the east of Europe, separated them- 
selves from Rome long before us, are pious 
and numerous also ; and, without going 
beyond the Reformation to seek more ex- 
amples, they are pious in great number who 
believe in a redemption and a sacrifice, in 
salvation by Christ and by Christ crucified ; 
and those who believe further that this death 
was expiatory, and that Jesus consented 
not only to fulfil a mission, but to undergo 
a chastisement ; they are pious in great 
number who believe that man is feeble, 
miserable, fallen, and that what faith calls 
the slavery of sin is what philosophy calls 
passions and temperament ; and they who, 
going still further, believe that man is abso- 
lutely powerless to will and to accomplish 
the least good by himself ; they are pious 
in great number who believe that God 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 177 

knows everything, that man is free, that 
no one is condemned or saved beforehand ; 
and they who, going farther, believe in an 
eternal decree, of an irrevocable and irre- 
sistible predestination. Everywhere, in all 
communities and in all sects, everywhere 
there is piety ; but piety evidently follows 
faith, and depends upon it ; the diversities 
of belief are reflected in it, and thus, sad 
and terrible, the question presents itself: Of 
what piety is it said that it has the promise 
of the present life and that of the future ? 
Sad and terrible ! No, brethren ; from a dis- 
tance, I acknowledge this doubt afflicts and 
terrifies ; examined closely, these terrors and 
sorrows disappear, and, without carrying the 
question beyond Christianity, though the 
same principles apply to heathen antiquity, 
and to all humanity, I hope to show you 
that all sincere piety has the promises of the 
present and the future life. Let us study, 
first, these promises themselves, and the 
characteristic sign of sincerity will spring 
from them as flame springs from the hearth* 
12 



178 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

I. Christian piety governs life, death, and 
immortality, and governs them all three with 
an equal force. It could not do anything 
less, I must repeat it to you, and we should 
reject it as insufficient if it did not respond, 
unceasingly, to these three requirements of 
our nature ; for to live, die, and be born again, 
behold our fate. 

Consider a moment this life ; see what 
man may make of it, and see if, whatever 
manner he adopts to undergo his life, see if 
piety may not presently come to hover, so 
to say, over all this existence, and submit it 
to its sovereign influence. The promises of 
this life, what are they ? Consult your ex- 
perience, it will anticipate from idea to idea 
all my words ; the promise of this life is a 
little joy, — who has not tasted it ? who has 
not had good days in his life? who has 
never seen the heavens open, for some mo- 
ments at least, above his head, and send 
to him a soft ray of sunshine? who, my 
brethren, has never seen the azure ? In all 
the skies of our world there is a little azure 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 179 

from time to time for all; the division is 
mo.t unequal, and the storms, which pass 
quickly over some, seem to pause, as if from 
choice, over others ; but ingratitude alone 
accuses Providence of forgetfulness, and per- 
suades itself that God oppresses his children 
for pleasure. The little of happiness which 
this life promises, how will you embellish 
it ? How will you give to it longer dura- 
tion and greater charm ? how will you find 
in it the secret and unforeseen sweetness 
which centuples its price ? By piety, by the 
piety which shall recall to you, that the 
science so well studied by St. Paul, of being 
content with the situation in which one finds 
himself ] can be learned by all ; and which 
will force you to say, yourself, like the patri- 
arch, however modest may have been your 
fortune and short your joy : Lord, I am too 
insignificant beside the price of thy benefits! 
Promises of joy the present life mingles 
always with promises of pain and sorrow ; 
and of this truth, brethren, I shall give you 
no proof; for if one finds sometimes some 



180 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

unfortunates who exclaim : There is no hap- 
piness on the earth, never has a happy one 
been found to say : There is no unhappiness. 
Well ! piety, when a poignant and profound 
chagrin is thrown into the balance of life, 
piety alone can throw beside it a counter- 
poise, which makes an equilibrium for the 
moment, and which prevails later ; it is in 
the temple, in the house of prayer, where 
one has prayed with those whom one loved, 
it is in the presence of God, it is with the 
Gospel in the hand, that the tears lose their 
bitterness, because all the tears which may 
flow from our eyes will never efface one iota 
of these sublime words : Blessed are they 
tvho weep, for they shall be comforted, — a 
promise that the world, which so often puts 
despair in the place of sorrow, takes for a 
cruel and deceitful irony, a promise which 
belongs of right only to piety ! . . . . 

Happy, still, did we shed in this life only 
tears of grief; too often ought to mingle 
with them tears of repentance; and we are 
wrong to groan more for our misfortunes 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 181 

than our sins, for our transgressions are, at 
bottom, our true and worst misfortunes. 
Admire here, again, the power of piety. 
The indulgent and flattering world then 
rises, and says : Have we not all passions 
and defects ? are we not all young, each in 
his time? who has promised to be perfect? 
. . . . and these fallacious accommodations 
lull the conscience to sleep for a time, with- 
out calming the regret, without taking from 
sin its bitter deceptions; piety, on the con- 
trary, then raises its grand voice, says to 
David: Thou art the man; and, in a softer 
voice, it immediately adds : The Eternal has 
wiped away thy sin; thou shalt not die! 
and the moral and religious life, the life of 
progress and sanctification, recommences, so 
true is it that piety has the promise of the 
life that now is. 

Be not astonished, that it should be vic- 
torious over death, since it is over sin to 
blot it out, and over repentance to soften it ; 
piety dominates death, whether one suffers 
it or sees it suffered ; it governs it so far as 



182 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

to change the groans into cries of victory, 
the darkness into light, anguish into hope, 
the last adieus into adieus for a day. But 
it alone has received from God this divine 
power, and if you compare one by one 
the vain resources that man has contrived 
against death with the power of piety, you 
will find nothing which resembles it. Look 
at materialism. One is mournfully occu- 
pied with death and it says: Why com- 
plain and murmur? you follow the common 
law of the body ; you fall into dust because 
you are but dust; the machine is worn out, 
it stops, and what you call disease, death, 
decay, is only a simple separation of parts ; 
you die as a tree dies when its sap is ex- 
hausted, and the only difference between 
yourself and it is, that it lives longer than 

you ; but it will die in its turn One 

is sadly occupied with death, and other 
dreamers arrive and say : You are about to 
reunite yourself to the great Whole, to con- 
found yourself with Nature, to lose yourself 
in the Universe ; your life ceases not, it but 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 183 

re-enters the universal Life; it is a spark 
which rejoins the fire, and it is natural that 
it should disappear there ; the drops of water 
are made to mingle themselves with the 
ocean and be swallowed up ; the bubbles 
of air are destined to disseminate themselves 
through the atmosphere and vanish in it ; 

death is an absorption One is sadly 

occupied with death, and the philosophy 
which knows only how to doubt arrives and 
says coldly : Opinions are divided ; it may 
be that death is but a dream, and it may be 
that it is annihilation ; appearances are in 
favor of annihilation, if the reasonings are 
for sleep ; have a little patience ; you will 

soon know what it is And this is what 

the world calls wisdom ! Behold what 
wretched mortals have taken for consola- 
tion ! Ah ! this is a deceitful consolation, 
upon w T hich pride may feed itself, but that 
a profound grief rejects with horror, like 
those phantoms of the night to whom one 
is always tempted to say : What do you 
want with me ? . . . . Amidst the silence of 



184 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

the tombs, piety comes to hold a very differ- 
ent language. There is a God in heaven, 
it cries, and he calls himself the Eternal, and 
his children cannot perish, and the least 
that an eternal God has been able to give 
us is immortality; there came a Saviour, 
and if there is no immortality, what is his 
salvation ? a barren deception, by which he 
gained nothing himself but to die upon a 
cross. .... And pouring thus, in abundance, 
immortal hopes into the heart of the dying 
man, piety breaks, one by one, the stings 
of death, and demonstrates the certainty 
of a peaceful awakening where he saw 
only annihilation and decomposition, eter- 
nal darkness, and also eternal separations. 

It speaks to us thus of death, because, 
with the same assurance, it can speak to us 
of immortality ; to piety alone belong the 
promises of the life to come. Brethren, I do 
not come before you to judge human reason 
unjustly ; it is true, that reason has always 
had a glimpse of immortality, and when 
man has been told that annihilation awaited 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 185 

him, he has not always known how to re- 
fute the lie, but has almost always known 
that it was a lie. But, what kind of im- 
mortality did it foresee ? An immortality 
modelled always upon life. In antiquity, 
the heroes of the first races hoped to find 
again, in a future life, their glory and their 
arms ; far from our climes, the poor savage 
casts into the grave of his friend the uten- 
sils and treasures that he prized the most, 
in order that he may find them again; 
and, among us, see the men whose reason 
has made every progress except that of faith, 
the wise men w 7 ho know everything except 
the one thing needful, and who have studied 
all books except the one Divine Book, they 
believe in immortality ; but what do they 
hope, above all, for the future life ? to con- 
tinue their studies, to discover the many 
secrets which still escape them, to know 
many things that they know not; these are 
the promises of their science. Piety has all 
those promises, and I firmly believe, that 
when the soul breaks its chain, and lets fall 



186 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

this body of dust, the veil which conceals 
the truth from us falls with it ; creation and 
nature, providence and redemption, life and 
eternity, celestial spheres, myriads of worlds 
shining in space, glory of Christ and glory 
of God, yes, all, all is given to us to know. 
And yet piety has promises better still; 
promises of pardon : we shall be then fully 
reconciled with our supreme Judge, and he 
will put far from his face, all our grievous 
transgressions which displease him; prom- 
ises of holiness: He who is dead is freed 
from sin, and no temptation will pursue us 
in heaven ; promises of happiness : our last 
tears will have flowed, they are dried, and a 
pure joy will pervade our souls become 
worthy to taste it ; promises of love : it will 
be given to us to love again, and to love 
better than in this world, those whom we 
have cherished with so much joy, and wept 
with so much regret; promises, finally, of 
union with God : we shall be nearer to God 
our Father ; all will be subjected to Christ, 
and Christ will be subjected to God, and 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 187 



God will be all in all ; all things shall be 
made new ; Jesus will not lose any one of 
those whom the celestial Father has given 
to him, and these magnificent promises 
which respond to all the wants of our being, 
and to all the elements of our nature, these 
promises, which you would seek in vain 
with all that is powerful, all that is loving 
and good, all that is sublime upon the earth, 
these promises piety holds. 

II. Such are, my brethren, the privileges 
and rights of piety, and the more elevated 
are these guaranties that it alone can trans- 
mit to us, the more important is it to deter- 
mine with precision and certainty to what 
sort of piety they belong. 

The first response is easy, they belong to 
Christian piety ; it is that alone which is 
concerned, and, once again, I avoid design- 
edly carrying the question out of Chris- 
tianity ; the field is ample enough without 
leaving it. But in Christendom itself there 
is, as I have reminded you, more than one 
kind of piety, since there is diversity of both 



188 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

worship and faith. By what sign can that 
be recognized, to which belong these mag- 
nificent promises ? Brethren, they belong 
of right to all sincere piety. Sincerity, that 
is the only rule which can weigh equally 
upon all Christians ; all have a right to ex- 
amine, and, consequently, to conclude ; all 
have a right to open the Gospel and seek 
there their faith ; sincerity, it is the first 
character that the ever-open eye of the 
supreme Judge seeks in the depths of our 
hearts. If he had wished that we should 
all have the same belief, if he had wished 
that we should all reply after the same 
manner to this question of the Saviour: 
Whom do men say that lam? God would 
have arranged revelation and reason other- 
wise ; he would have established a different 
harmony between them. But no, he took 
care that a book should be written, a book 
inspired, alone among all others, and he 
has said : Behold my word ; seek there the 
truth. Is it possible that we should all un- 
derstand this divine volume in the same 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 189 

manner ? This is to demand that all intel- 
lects, all imaginations, all sensibilities, and 
even all educations, should be equal, should 
be alike ; it is to demand the opposite of 
what exists, the opposite of what God has 
made ; and since each one has his degree of 
light and his measure of grace, what means 
remains to arrive at a faith which God ap- 
proves, at a piety which transmits the two 
great promises : this means is truth, when 
attainable, and when not, when involuntary 
error veils it, and enfeebles its clearness, it 
is sincerity, which before God has the same 
value. 

But how! you will say to me, as these 
differences bear upon secondary points, they 
are of little import; is it not necessary, on 
the contrary, in order that piety may suc- 
ceed in triumphing over life, death, and im- 
mortality, that it should rest upon an entire 
faith in the fundamental truths which are the 
basis of Christianity ? . . . . The basis ! . . . . 
Where is it ? who will show it to us ? who, 
making the entire tour of the immense edi- 



190 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

fice, can stop and say : Behold the corner- 
stone, the head stone of the corner ? who 
will decide what is accessory and what is 
fundamental, will separate Christianity into 
two parts, and say to the world : That you 
may reject without risk : this must be be- 
lieved under pain of perdition ? Where is 
there on the earth the authority which will 
assume so terrible a responsibility, and will 
decide this question of eternity ? Is there, 
then, one inspired, a prophet, an envoy of 
God, a representative of heaven, a divine 
guarantor of the truth, present and living in 
the midst of us, to tell us of the truth : 
Behold it! submit yourselves, and believe ! 
. ... It is evident, my brethren, that this 
authority does not exist. We are all fal- 
lible, and each one of us should say to his 
brother: I have read the Gospel; I have 
prayed to God, and I believe in the Gospel 
interpreted in such a sense, but I may de- 
ceive myself. .... I may deceive myself! 
Ah ! if those words terminated all confes- 
sions of faith, all expositions of doctrine, 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 191 

we should each believe according to our 
conscience, all anathemas would be reduced 
to silence, peace would reign throughout 
Christendom, all the churches would -be sis- 
ters, and there would truly be but one flock, 
as there is but one Shepherd. 

I demand, you will tell me, what God 
has already done ; it is the Gospel itself 
which is the best interpreter of the Gospel ; 
it is revelation which distinguishes what is 
accessory and liable to doubt from that 
which is fundamental and obligatory. Let 
us, then, call upon the Gospel, and see if it 
is thus. Behold a moralist who opens the 
Sacred Book and reads : These three things 
remain, faith, hope, and charity; bat the 
greatest of these is charity ; do you compre- 
hend ? cries he ; charity is better than faith ; 
of what importance, then, are your cloudy 
disputes, and your mysterious dogmas ; 
morality, that is the foundation of religion ; 

virtue is the basis of Christianity And 

behold a theologian who replies to him : 
Jesus says : / and the Father are one ; deny 



192 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 

this doctrine : what will remain to you of 
Christianity ; you create for yourself, then, a 
false idea of the Author of Christianity, and 
who knows not the workman cannot under- 
stand the work : the union of Jesus and of 
God, the divinity of the Saviour, these are 

the bases of Christianity And, finally, 

behold a philosopher who will recall to you 
that, according to St. Paul, there is one 
God, and one mediator between God and 
men, namely, Jesus Christ, a man ; you easily 
see, he will add, that by this word man, 
which terminates with so much force the 
phrase and the idea, St. Paul shows suffi- 
ciently that the life of Christ in this worlds 
his perfect virtue, his irreproachable holi- 
ness, is the essential part of the Gospel ; 
here, then, here is the basis of Christianity. 
.... Brethren, I ask you again, Who shall 
decide between them ? who will relieve all 
doubts here, and, unveiling the sun of jus- 
tice, scattering all the clouds which surround 
it, will constrain us to walk only by its pure 
light ? And what, then, will the Lord him- 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 193 

self do, when a piety drawn from the source 
that he has opened to us, from the source 
of the Gospel, a piety which has sought the 
truth sincerely and not found it, a piety 
which believes with humility according to its 
light, shall demand of him the promises of 
the present life and those of the life to come ; 
what will the Lord do ? He will refuse to 
this piety, which deceives itself in good faith, 
he will refuse these promises, and give de- 
spair instead ! No, you do not believe it ; 
no, it is impossible ; all sincerity is good 
before God, and so long as there arises no 
infallible authority to decide what is true or 
false, and what is accessory or fundamental, 
this, my brethren, this is what we will all 
do ; in the first place, we will believe without 
uneasiness, after our manner, according to 
our conscience and our reason ; then we 
will always claim the titles of faithful and 
believer, of elect and ransomed ; in a word, 
of Christian, and we will never give them 
up ; finally, we will never refuse them to 
any one, and if, unfortunately, we are told : 
13 



194 THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY, 

You have not the truth, faith, life, grace, 
we will simply reply to our judges : Yours 
is a most melancholy Christianity, since it 
forces you to believe that the immese ma- 
jority of men are lost and lose themselves ; 
we are happier, our Christianity is gentler, 
and we believe that you deceive yourselves, 
but you deceive yourselves sincerely; we 
render homage to your sincere piety ; it has, 
like ours, the promises of the present life 
and those of the future life. God grant, O 
my brethren ! that these happy and tender 
thoughts may penetrate to the depths of 
our hearts, and reign there influentially : 
God grant that all may be inspired with a 
zeal which flinches before no sacrifice, and 
a love which disquiets itself with no dis- 
agreement. Then the reformed faith will 
see open before it a long career of triumph ; 
we shall all have the fruits of liberty with- 
out any of its bitterness ; unity of spirit will 
be preserved by the bond of peace ; the occa- 
sion will never come to make the melancholy 
demand : Who art thou, thou who condemnest 



THE TWO PROMISES TO PIETY. 195 

others, and Christendom, glorious, holy, and 
peaceful, will arrive from progress to prog- 
ress at the day, when faith, changing into 
sight, the diversities of belief terminated 
for ever, shall lose themselves and be for- 
gotten in the eternal communion of the 
saints. 



